Jupe courte 👗✨ – Une histoire passionnante de Catulle Mendès

Jupe courte 👗✨ – Une histoire passionnante de Catulle Mendès

In this story, ‘Short Skirt’ by Catulle Mendès, we discover a poignant tale where beauty and emotion mingle with striking intensity. Through characters rich in complexity, the author draws us into a universe where feelings and personal choices profoundly influence destinies. A work where desire and passion are revealed in a new and fascinating light. Chapter 1. Madame de Marcellis rang, chimed, entered like a gust of wind—a gust of lace and faille in flying rice powder —and such was the hurricane of her intrusion that she seemed to have broken down the door that had just been opened by a maid, astonished by this frantic visit at nine o’clock in the morning. –Don’t say a word! Don’t be surprised at anything! –But, Madame… –Take it! It’s a banknote. And the pretty Fury, a Fury who would be a Grace, crossed the drawing-room, the boudoir, was already lifting the door of the bedroom. –But, Madame, my mistress has gone out. –I know it! –For a long time. –I know it! –She has gone to the Bois… –I know it! –She will not return before noon. –I know it! –The room is in disorder. –Thank God! –The bed is not made. –I hope so! She saw with her own eyes that the cambric of the sheets, the covers pushed back by the yawn of the awakening and the stretching of the leg seeking the rug, the pillow filled with Alençon in which was sunk a hollow no bigger than a pretty head, had not been touched since the recent rising; a nightgown, in black surah, fallen in a slip, still warm no doubt, billowed in a circle on the step of the bed, with folds that remember, near the narrow mules of mauve satin, a little pink as if from the memory of the small feet that nestled in them. –You didn’t open the windows, at least? –No, Madame. –Good! And then, in the room impregnated with the intimate and mysterious aroma communicated to the air, to the fabrics, to the furniture, to all things, by the blossoming of a young flesh softened by the nocturnal heat and the breath of a sleep with fresh lips, it was an extraordinary and adorable spectacle. Her hat, her pelisse, her dress, which barely held up , the silk petticoat, the nanzouck petticoat, and the veils closer to the most secret nudity, and the stockings which had in the air the palpitations of wings, Madame de Marcellis removed, untied, tore, tore off everything! so that she appeared as naked as the naiads in the paintings, scraping with the pink tip of her toe the sheet of springs deep in the woods. Stupefaction of the chambermaid who cried out , raised her arms to the ceiling! The strange visitor would not be diverted from her design. She seized the black surah chemise, dressed herself in it, clutching it against her, feeling warm; she slipped into bed, put her head in the hollow of the pillow, pulled the disorder of sheets and blankets higher than her ears. “But, Madam… but, Madam…” She didn’t hear, or pretended not to hear. She stirred, lay down, curled up, suddenly stopped moving: her breasts swelled for a long time until they lifted the fabric, as if she wanted to inhale entirely some dear and intense perfume; then she moved even more, rubbed her arms, her legs, her back, her belly, all her skin with the cambric, kissed or bit the warm place of the pillow, shook her hair, which was like a trap offered to all the scattered scents . Finally, after remaining an hour in the usurped bed, she consented to leave it, but she kept the surah chemise, over which she put, with the haste of a miser closing his coffer, the petticoat, the dress and the pelisse. Dressed as tightly as possible, wrapped up to her ears, the very thick veil pulled down to her chin as if to trap her breath, she fled as quickly as she had come, was at the bottom of the stairs in a minute, threw herself into her carriage, had herself driven to Viscount Tristan, woke him with a kiss, and slipped in beside him, in the black surah shirt! However, beware of believing that Madame de Marcellis had lost her reason. A very sensible person, on the contrary; one must not judge people on vain appearances. In love with Viscount Tristan, in love as one is not, she suffered strangely because of the indifference of her friend, which was poorly concealed by caressing courtesies. She was neither desired nor cherished as she would have liked to be, and she guessed well in her vexed sadness that he remembered with too much complacency that terrible Madame de Ruremonde from whom one never completely detaches oneself. But of the mistress of the past, what did he regret above all? the light gold of her hair, the redness of her lips, the bistre freckles of her weary eyelids, – Madame de Ruremonde dyes and makes up herself so deliciously! – the pink shell of an ear or the slightly azure mother-of-pearl of her teeth? Was he remembering some delicate perversity, one of those ineffable refinements, where all monstrosity is complicated by all modesty, and where it is said, alas! that Madame de Ruremonde excels? The poor lover did not know what thought to dwell on, when, one evening, while kissing her hair, Tristan cried out, in a burst of frankness whose brutality he had to regret: “Hey! my dearest, where do you buy your perfumes? If this perfume were not yours, I believe, in truth, that there would be more exquisite ones. ” It was a ray of light! A vague aroma, personal, mysterious, in which all a kissed flesh was synthesized, the exhalation, doubtless deliberately heightened, of some unknown intimate warmth, that is what he missed about the departed love. She did not hesitate for a moment: what he wanted, she would give it to him! That is why she had rushed so early in the morning into the disordered room of Madame de Ruremonde, had stuffed herself into the bed full of a warm memory of sleep; that is why, imbued with stolen perfumes, she had brought to Viscount Tristan, under the black surah chemise, the fragrant delights of the rival alcove. Chapter 2. When she returned home,–after the sweetest of mornings,– happiness laughed in her eyes, placed everywhere, on her forehead, her cheek, her lips, gay, blooming roses. She had succeeded! She had triumphed! Yes, wanted, adored, taken, as she claimed to be, with all the ardor, with all the ecstasies. The good idea she had had to go and lie down in her enemy’s sheets! How well she had stolen from them the secret of being loved! What delighted her most was that Tristan, distraught, had sworn that he would see her again before the end of the day; he could no longer live without her, wanted to take her away, anywhere, very far away, to be alone forever , her and him. In truth, one thing tormented her a little: the borrowed odor would flee, the surah shirt would not long remember the flesh she caressed at first; but Madame de Marcellis hoped that the persistent illusion of love finally come would always believe to suck in the vanished scent. Another cause for concern was that her conduct did not seem entirely irreproachable to her: the thief felt a kind of scruples now ; it was little, what she had taken, a perfume! No matter, she had taken another’s property, and nothing is more reprehensible. Her conscience was not at ease; she would have felt much remorse—if she had not had so much joy! Ah! how happy she was, between the kisses of yesterday and the kisses of soon! She waited, in the raptures of an allured impatience, for the hour when she was to see the viscount again. Alas! the hour came, not the lover, and here is the letter that she opened, sensing disaster, daring to barely read: “Will you forgive me for having rediscovered in your love the taste of an old happiness? To detach myself from an ungrateful woman, I had made every effort; little by little, forgetfulness came; a few more days, and, belonging only to you, I would no longer have known the name of the one who had belonged to me. By what fatal change, this morning, did I breathe her lips on your lips? By what miracle did the perfume of your adorable body madden me with the perfume of her body? O you whom I was going to love, I owe to you the irresistible temptation to love only her; and I flee from you, because I have found her in you.” All the tears that she reserved for pleasure, Madame de Marcellis wept with pain, and with spite too. But what! she was forced to recognize that she was justly punished; and it is a proven fact that ill-gotten gains never profit. THE JUG MENDER Chapter 3. At that time, in a very large village where there were no fewer than two million inhabitants,—I hope you will not be so indiscreet as to ask me in what country this completely vanished village was located,—a prejudice, triumphant despite the murmurs of all practical people, demanded that young girls, upon getting married, offer their husbands, in addition to a dowry in hard cash and state annuities, a small and frail jug, no bigger than a chalice, absolutely intact; and the husband, barely offered, would break it, with a blow of his fist, mercilessly. What was the meaning of this custom? Did people take pleasure in counting, in the debris of the earthenware, the future years of happiness? As for the jug itself, the painters and poets of the period in question having all omitted,–as a result of another prejudice no less triumphant,–to reproduce it on their canvases and to describe it in their verses, I can only provide you with very incomplete information about this nuptial offering; everything leads us to believe, however, that it was pleasant to see, cute, delicate, painted a bright pink under foliage of gold or ebony; one can also suppose that it most frequently contained a most precious essence. What is certain is that the bride and groom were infinitely anxious to receive it in a state of perfect integrity; they showed themselves very dissatisfied with the least serious chip ; for a crack, they raised a loud cry. The absurdity of their demand was especially evident in this that they themselves had no other goal than to break the jug. Since, ultimately, its function was to be broken, what did it matter, I ask you, whether it had been broken yesterday, or was broken today? It seems, on the contrary, that a new husband should have been glad to have to take one less trouble. But the men of that time were on this point of unequaled obstinacy ; the best reasoning hardly persuaded them. Let us bless Providence for having been born in a century where humanity has finally freed itself from this childish preoccupation and so many others. The more difficult the earthenware was to break, the more joy they showed, the imbeciles! It was by its solidity that they measured their glory; and they knew no triumph as proud as to turn one’s nail on it, in the effort, or to bloody one’s fingers on it. Chapter 4. Given this state of mind, young girls, it goes without saying. to say, took great care of the precious object; sparing it as much as possible from knocks, gusts of wind, all chances of mishap; and, when it was necessary to dust it, they had the trembling caution, the lightness of hand of a collector handling a figurine from Saxony or an ivory from Japan. For fear of breaking it or filling it, they were careful not to go to the fountain! And they did not limit themselves to surrounding it with the most delicate care; they veiled it under fabrics, silks, wools, muslins, not less likely to discourage prying eyes than to cushion the blows; a person destined for marriage—there were already such unfortunate vocations at that time—feared almost as much to let her pitcher be seen as to let it break. Despite so many precautions, unfortunate incidents sometimes occurred; a misfortune can happen so quickly! as can be seen in the famous painting by Greuze. Young girls who, because of a false step or as a result of some other carelessness, could no longer add to their dowry anything but a noticeably damaged pitcher, second-hand so to speak, had, it is true, the possibility of excusing themselves on the grounds of their fragility, recognized by everyone, and on the clever or violent undertakings of certain impertinent people who claimed to enjoy, outside of marriage, the privilege of spouses. But these excuses did not completely exonerate the poor children; they were looked upon with a bad eye, pretending to pity them, and it was rare for them to succeed in getting married. Even those who, by dint of mysterious hypocrisy, managed to hide their misfortune—a jug can crack without making a noise—were hardly any better off, thanks to the furious discourtesy of disappointed husbands. So that, out of pity for the ingénues whose earthenware treasure had somewhat crumbled—and also in the hope of an honest retribution—clever people wondered if there was not a way to restore things, after an accident, to their original state, or almost; and, in the village of two million souls, there were soon well- versed specialists who made a trade of mending wedding jugs. Chapter 5. None of these specialists was as illustrious as the one I want to tell you about. His reputation was so widespread that people from all over the world came to him with the most difficult cases of breakage. And, in truth, he well deserved this fame, fertile in handsome profits, by the large number and perfection of his repairs. What methods did he use? I cannot say; no doubt he died without revealing the secret of his invention, and the chroniclers from whom I draw inspiration are silent on this point. But it is certain that he obtained marvelous results. “Don’t cry any more for your broken objects,” could have been the motto of this useful and famous man. Now the most attentive husbands were unaware of the unfortunate disappointments that were once too frequent; a few days of his applied method were enough to make all the cracks and splits of the damaged object disappear. It was without fear that young people would henceforth risk some negligence: they could count on him; he was the restorer, almost providential, of exquisite fragility! And his science did not stop at erasing the traces of a single, fleeting accident. No! Even jugs that had been chipped, dented, and broken into pieces by repeated use regained, thanks to him, the solidity and brilliance of newness. Naturally, such successes earned him many envious people. There were those who said that his merits were being exaggerated, that the good appearance of his welds did not stand up to a slightly serious examination, that only fools were taken in by them. What man of genius has not been mocked? What great invention has not been denied? But the jealous were soon reduced to silence by an absolutely extraordinary adventure, which was divulged no one knows how, and which crowned the practitioner’s glory. Chapter 6. Once he was in his office,–having already received that day. two or three hundred customers, for he was very expeditious,–he saw a young man enter, tall, dark, and a young girl, a little puny, timid, who lowered her eyes. –Good, he thought, a child who did not dare to come alone and whom her brother accompanies. And, getting up politely: “I see what it is. Mademoiselle, without meaning any harm, must have let her pitcher slip from her hand. A very small accident! No complications! Easy repair. ” But the young man replied, while the visitor, under her veil, blushed to the eyes: “Alas! You are mistaken, Monsieur. It is not for a mending that we wish to consult you. Quite the contrary! We have been married for two weeks, Madame and I; and although I have a singularly robust arm, despite the weight of my fist, it has been impossible for me until today to break the pitcher that my wife presented to me as is customary. Such a situation, you can well imagine, has everything necessary to displease me; and I have come to ask you, although the case is precisely contrary to your specialty… ” The illustrious practitioner was confounded with astonishment! He knew well that there were thousands of jugs that broke too quickly, that gave way—being of mediocre quality—at the first effort; but at no time, no, at no time, had he heard of a jug capable of resisting for two weeks—however strangely hard it was—the repeated blows of a very violent fist. There was here a most remarkable anomaly, and therefore a most interesting one; and it was with great eagerness that he offered to examine, immediately, the object so inconceivably solid. He considered it for a long time, at leisure, methodically, and recognized that it was indeed intact. And, suddenly, he could hardly suppress a cry of surprise and triumph! For, raising his eyes towards the young woman, whose veil had fallen, he had just recognized in her one of his customers: this jug,–this unbreakable jug,–it was he who had mended it! THE DOORBELL Their friendship as young women had remained exactly like their camaraderie as little girls. They loved each other in society as they had adored each other in the convent; they were hardly apart, they went to the Bois in the same carriage, to the theatre in the same proscenium, they wore similar outfits, they had among themselves, very quietly, at every moment, without reason, those little schoolgirl chatters, confidential, mingled with little laughs, which one would take for the chatter of warblers; and it was their greatest pleasure, when they were not being watched,—but they were almost always being watched, pretty as they were,—to kiss each other surreptitiously, in some corner, under the veils quickly raised and lowered. They would never have married Jeanne, M. de la Paumerie, and Pascale, M. de Montfriloux, if they had not undertaken to lodge them in the same house. The husbands kept the promise of the fiancés. They lived in Rue Malesherbes, Pascale on the first floor, Jeanne on the second; an interior staircase, from the boudoir of one, led to the boudoir of the other; so that they could see each other at any time, sometimes met on the middle steps, sat there, telling each other a thousand things, uncombed, in their dressing gowns; and they would not have been more separated than at the Ursulines, if their marital beds had been as close as their boarding beds, last year, in the large white dormitory. Yet this close intimacy was not enough for their jealous tenderness, and Pascale, one day, said to Jeanne, after a silence, with the air of a person who has reflected for a long time on a serious subject: –What do you think of marriage, darling? –From what point of view? asked Jeanne. –From the point of view… which you can well guess! –Well! my God, I think that it is not as frightening, after all, as we had supposed; and it does not make us wait too long to compensate for its first bitterness. –That is also my opinion. One gets used to everything; one even comes to take some pleasure in things which, at first, seemed very dreadful; for my part, I admit that I now endure the caresses of M. de Montfriloux with a patience for which I have little merit. –I can tell you as much; my complaisances towards M. de la Paumerie are rewarded with a satisfaction which sometimes goes to excess. –However, my darling, my happiness is not perfect! –Why is that, my darling? –Because you have no share, you, in the delights which marriage obliges me to accept. –Oh! how mistaken you are. However loving M. de Montfriloux may be, I assure you that M. de la Paumerie… –I understand! Your husband does not fail to show you all the tenderness imaginable, but he does not show it to you at the very moment when mine assures me of his love; I happen to be happy at times when you are not; it is because of this discord that my friendship is distressed. Jeanne was very touched by her friend’s concern. “Isn’t it a cruel thing,” Pascale continued, “to think that at the divine moment (for it is divine, there’s no denying it), when the kiss brings your soul to your lips, the one you cherish more than yourself, more than anything, perhaps yawns, indifferent, on the page of some book , or turns toward the alley, to fall asleep? Do you not feel a kind of remorse for the delights she does not share? Ah! darling, what an ecstasy it would be for two souls, truly sisters like ours , to know, to be sure that they feel the same intoxication in the same minute, that they ascend at the same time to the same paradise! ” “It is obvious that this certainty would add greatly to the pleasure of each; but it would be rather difficult to achieve such a result; for, after all, continued Jeanne, smiling, we cannot ask our husbands to choose precisely… “Who is speaking to you of our husbands? Their initiative has no place in this, and ours may be enough to realize my dream. Jeanne, my darling! If you will swear to me to keep the commitment that I will demand of you, I will no longer be troubled from now on, in my dearest joys, by the sorrow of thinking that they are not common to us. ” “Whatever you demand, I will do it,” said Jeanne; “I swear our friendship!” “Listen to me, darling.” And Pascale spoke in a low voice in the ear of her friend, who first opened her eyes wide and then burst out laughing. “What? Really? Is that what you invented? ” “Yes! “A bell? “Electric! “From your alcove?… ” “To yours! ” “But this is madness! “Will you keep your oath?” Jeanne stopped laughing. “I’ll hold him,” she said. Chapter 7. A few days after this conversation, M. de la Paumerie was a man absolutely astonished, and he could understand nothing of his wife’s fancies. Gay as a bird that delights in its cage, smiling as soon as he entered, quickly offering her lips, she had not ceased to be, as long as the day lasted, the adorable Jeanne of old; but she showed herself, in the evening, to be in a rather strange mood. It was in vain that he approached her coaxingly, while she untied her hair in front of the mirror or slid the black silk of her stocking down her slender leg; she had quite disconcerting “leave me alone” remarks, not without a sigh, which was like the confession of regret; and, when they were close to each other, their heads in the pillow, under the curtains of the alcove, she would curl up viciously, with fierce recoils, in her formerly less austere chemise, would refuse his mouth, his shoulders, his arms, would look at the wall, would say she was tired, would pretend to be falling asleep, still sighing. So much so that the vexed husband would soon fall asleep himself, a real sleep. But suddenly, tender arms around his neck and lips on his lips would pull him from his rest, at the same time as a small, sharp, repeated, barely perceptible noise, like a ringing muffled in cotton wool, would ring in the silence of the room. What was it then? He thought it was a buzzing in the ears like when one is suddenly awakened, or some remnant of a dream. Besides, it was not given to him to pay much attention to this noise, so much did Jeanne disturb him with cute caresses which do not hear that one is occupied with something else! M. de la Paumerie, certainly , did not complain of these pleasant awakenings; the sweetness of reality—fresh breast emerging from ribbons and guipure, frail shoulder where the head bends with cat-like movements, chemise which no longer knows what it is doing there—was enough to console him for all the vanished dreams. It was only after the tenderness that his surprise returned to him; and he looked at his wife, scratching his ear, not daring to question. But whether M. de la Paumerie was astonished or not, it hardly mattered; all was for the best, since Pascale, thanks to her innocent stratagem and thanks to her friend’s obedience to the great oath sworn, no longer knew the sorrow of selfish joys; and, if anything unfortunate resulted from all this for Jeanne’s husband, one can only blame it on bad luck. Chapter 8. The Viscount d’Argelès was very much in love with Madame de la Paumerie. Did she feel some pleasure in seeing herself loved by a man of the best world, well-made in person, whom few women would have disdained? There is nothing improbable in this hypothesis; but she had never failed to show him, by the reserve of her attitude and the coldness of her looks, that he nourished guilty hopes in vain . Unfortunately, M. d’Argelès was not one of those lovers who become discouraged at the first setbacks; he prided himself on his persistence as well as his audacity. One day when the valet was not in the apartment, and the maid, perhaps an accomplice, had just left, he impertinently entered Madame de la Paumerie’s apartment. “Get out, Monsieur!” she said with a terror all the more justified because all her pink skin was visible to him through the transparent dressing gown, in the half-light of the boudoir. Far from leaving, he rushed towards her, knelt down, took her hands, and bit all the patches of cambric with kisses. And he stammered the most ardent words: that he adored her madly; that he was ready to die for her love; that he could be killed, but not forced to leave this room where he was intoxicated by the air she had breathed, by the dear perfume that came from her. To tell the truth, Jeanne was not without feeling some emotion, especially since, while she was speaking, M. d’Argelès had approached again, forced her to sit down again on the chaise longue, and was putting the warmth of his breath on her neck and hair; and, by an unfortunate coincidence, Madame de la Paumerie was more sensitive than anyone else to the tender tickling of breath on the skin. No matter! She would emerge victorious from this struggle! She stood up despite the caresses with which he imprisoned her; and she was about to repeat: “Get out of here, I want you,” pointing to the door with a dignified gesture to which there would be nothing to reply… when the doorbell rang! Yes, it rang, unexpectedly, in broad daylight! Although the noise came from a little far away, from the next room, Jeanne recognized it, could not be mistaken. Ah! truly, Pascale chose her time well to ring! She was not unaware, however, that M. de la Paumerie, at this hour, was always out. What to do? Disobey her friend, break a sacred engagement? Jeanne could not bear the idea. No, she would never bring herself to commit such a lack of faith. And the bell, as if impatient, still rang, still rang, while M. d’Argelès continued to beg, on his knees, too seductive. Alas! Jeanne let herself fall onto the chaise longue, hiding her eyes under her fingers, veiled by her untied hair,—a victim of her fidelity to the oath. THE DRAWBACK OF PERFECTION Chapter 9. Poor little beauty, so cheerful once, and now languishing, all melancholy, with the air of a mourning rose! What has happened to her? Where did a bitter thought come from under that pretty brow that never thought? I am willing to tell you, knowing it from a reliable source. But you must take things a little too far. Lise Emmelin had in her eye the challenge of a person sure of herself. You must have noticed the almost impertinent assurance of the owner and the clerks in the very well-stocked shops that boast of having everything that customers could desire? This assurance was Lise Emmelin’s. Red curls that peck her eyebrows at the tip of the mule that lifts Valenciennes, her whole cute being, showing her teeth, swelling her neck, pointing under the surah the arrows of the throat, making the skirt puff out with a lively leap of the loins—oh! the disturbing display!—seemed to say to people, in provocative approaches of warmth and odors: “Speak! What do you want? Pearls in a pink case? I have some. Down of white gold, that velvets the underside of the chin? Here it is. Roundnesses of snow where two strawberries have just ripened? I have some. Other roundnesses, larger, hard as porphyry, with a little sign at the bottom? It’s a specialty of the house.” If you please breathe in heady odors like those of russet mosses, I have a whole balance left that is not about to be exhausted. Come, see, choose. And with that, gentlemen? ” But this pretty mute babble, a little like that of the salesmen, differed in that it was not a lie at all; Lise Emmelin had the right to say that hers was the best-stocked shop in the world with sweet merchandise of love! Nothing as perfect, I swear to you, as this little figurine of Venus. Everyone knows the thirty conditions of absolute beauty—thirty, or perhaps thirty-one?—that François Corniger put into Latin verse and Brantôme into French prose. Well , once, with the book in one hand and her shirt falling off, Lise, before her psyche, questioned the page and the mirror in turn: she had reason to be as satisfied as possible. The book said: “You need three white things: your skin, your teeth, your hands.” The mirror replied: “Admire the mother-of-pearl of your teeth, the lilies of your skin, and your frail hands the color of clematis!” “You need,” said the book, “three brown things: your eyelids, your eyebrows, your eyes. ” ” Are your eyes, your eyebrows, your eyelids not made of dark gold,” replied the mirror, “? You need three red things: your lips, your cheek, your nails. Your delicate nails are crimson with blood, your cheek is a rose barely frosted with rice powder, and your lips look like a rather large strawberry that is opening from being too ripe.” “You need three large things: your forehead, the space between your eyebrows, your chest.” How would your full, firm breasts fit there if your chest were not spacious enough? There is the proper distance between the arches of your eyebrows; as for the forehead, the author rambles on, and nothing is more exquisite than almost no skin under the little crazy hairs that curl up. “It requires three small things, the tips of the breasts, the nose, the head. –Your head is that of a child; a wild rose petal is larger than your double pink nostril, and the tips of your throat are two raspberries, barely visible, in the snow.” “It requires three long things, the hair, the hands, the body. –Your slender body tapers between the sheets like a fleeing snake, your hands are careful not to be clumsy or too plump, and, one evening when Ludovic was kissing your heels, the tips of your golden curls tickled his lips.” “You need three short things: ears, feet, teeth. You have nothing in common with the English women with ogre teeth, who leave giant footprints in the sand of the beaches, and your ears are the fine shells that Cypris Anadyomene did not shake when he came out of the sea.” “It takes three slender things, the fingers, the hair, the lips.–Your lips would be thin if they had not acquired in the kiss the habit of being well opened; the threads of the Virgin, tinted with suns, are less light than your hair; and nothing is more delicate than the curl of your tapered fingers.” “It takes three large things, the arm, the thigh, the calf.–Your flesh swells where it is necessary in bossements of living silk.” “It takes three narrow things, the mouth, the ankle, the waist.–Your waist, on the flare of the hips, has the fine suppleness of a reed; a girl’s bracelet would be too large a ring for your ankle, and your mouth is so cute that your teeth would not fit in it if they were not small as grains of rice!” It is thought that Lise took great pleasure in this dialogue between the book and the gallant mirror. However, towards the end, she was a little surprised. What! Just three narrow things? She was not unaware—although the author, doubtless honestly expurgated, said nothing about it and the psyche could see and know nothing about it—she was not unaware that perfect beauty required a fourth narrowness; and she burst out laughing, assured, thanks to tender experiences often repeated, that the thirty-first condition, no more than the others, was lacking ! Chapter 10. What would have been disastrous was if Lise, perfect as she was—even more perfect than François Corniger demanded— had shown herself to be stingy with the treasures that had been so generously bestowed upon her. How many joys stolen from our eyes, from our lips, if such beauty had had no confidant but the psyche of the boudoir! Thank heavens, the exquisite creature understood to what the possession of so many charms obliged her, and she rightly thought that a rose would be very blameworthy to hide itself beneath the leaves and imprison its perfumes in its closed corolla. With the audacity to offer herself, she often had the clemency to give herself. She did not refuse desire the rhyme it hopes for. Sure of admiration, she held little regard for respect, and anyone who had not lacked it would have seemed very impertinent to her. But it was not only the feeling of her duty that inclined her to mercies. In being gentle, she found sweetness ; she took pleasure in not driving people to despair; like someone who warms himself, full of ease, by the fire he has just lit. Lise Emmelin was precisely the opposite of those people devoid of tenderness, who watch during a kiss for the flutter of a fly on the muslin of the alcove. She thought about what she was doing, with satisfaction. That her conduct might have shocked austere moralists, she was not in the least concerned, always having ready the answer of her pretty laugh. So that with her twenty loves, quickly blossoming, quickly fading, which sometimes blossomed again, mad and more charming for being so, scattering her life to every whim, she would never have ceased to be as perfectly happy as happily perfect, if Count Horace de Hervadec, arriving from Brittany, had not been introduced to her one evening when, for five or six hours, she had loved no one. Chapter 11. She fell passionately in love with this robust gentleman so different from the. slender lovers to whom, until then, she had had to resign herself. She looked, with eyes filled with ecstasy, at this virile beauty, almost graceless, but superb, – the beauty of a barbarian hero. One guessed that he had lived in the woods, by the sea, a great hunter, a great walker, strong enough to strangle wolves, strong enough not to stagger under the waves that shook the rocks! A giant, in truth, whose step made the floorboards creak through the thickness of the carpet, and who would have broken from his heaviness all the bedsteads and all the chaise longues. Lise, for a moment, would have jumped on his neck, at the first meeting, at the risk of being crushed in an embrace. There are moments when the pretty Saxon porcelains, if they could speak, would cry out: “I want to be broken!” She did not dare to be so prompt, terrified in fact to see him so excessive, and, perhaps still, because of a modesty for which one could not blame her. But this restraint did not make her lose a very considerable time: the next evening, in the frankness of her panic, she entered the strong Breton’s house, and laughed at him, charming, charmed, with all the kisses on her lips, her hair quickly untied, letting him do whatever he wanted with a dress that was hanging on nothing! Chapter 12. Alas! it is from our most ardent hopes that our most bitter sadnesses are born. Those who saw Lise Emmelin the day after this escapade almost did not recognize her, so morose was her brow, so sad were her eyes, with the staring expression of a cat whose bowl of cream has been taken away. She heaved sighs that would break the soul,—little mouth so accustomed to laughter,—and the cuteness of her desolation made one think of the grief a doll would feel. But it was a very great grief in spite of what smile and grace she retained in her appearance. She shut herself away for a whole day, would not see anyone; the maid’s curiosity heard these words through the door: “Ah! it’s awful! I love him so much! It’s awful!” What had happened to the enormous Breton, strong enough to strangle wolves, strong enough not to tremble under the waves? No one would have ever known, no doubt, if Mademoiselle Anatoline Meyer had not questioned her friend with the most tender entreaties. “Come, come, my little Lise, tell me what happened. Did he mistreat you, the savage?” “Alas! no,” said Lise. “So it must be that, seeing him more closely, you have ceased to be in love with him and that you are mourning a lost hope?” “I still love him, more than I can say!” “I can guess. This giant is not what he seems. Some faces are so deceptive.” “You guess very badly, I swear!” “Then I don’t know what to think. For, after all, it is impossible to imagine that you displeased him, you, so deliciously pretty, you, my dear, so perfect.” “All the trouble comes from that, precisely!” “How so , darling?” “Eh!” said Lise, bursting into tears, perfect, I am too perfect! THE HAIR I was finally irritated by the pretension of this extraordinary man! For he boasted of having foiled, at all times, all the ruses, all the plots of the beautiful people who were his lovers, of never having been the dupe of any woman, not even his own! –Arnolphe, he said, was played by Agnès and Bartholo by Rosine, but that does not prove that Agnès was very clever and Rosine very cunning: it simply proves that Arnolphe and Bartholo were imbeciles. Any man who is not a fool can be betrayed by an ingénue or a coquette, — since there are unexpected and rapid loves and he holds many kisses in the minute of the passing wind! — but he cannot be deceived by them. Sganarelle often; but Sganarelle without knowing it, never. I look out the window, you are kissing the one I adore, it is possible; but, as soon as I turn around, I realize that you have kissed her. “Are you coming home very late, my darling?” – “I went to see my sister who is very ill.” Response: a shrug of the shoulders. “You are leaving your lover’s house, and you are going to leave my house, never to return!” The malice of women, – whatever tradition may say, – is absolutely devoid of ingenuity. Venus, who was a goddess, did not succeed in flouting Vulcan who was not a very intelligent god; he owed her to resemble, by the forehead, a faun, but he caught her in the net of steel. The Machiavellianism of wives and daughters has childish candor; their dissimulation confesses everything; their traps have evidence as their sign. Unless you are deaf, blind, and stupid, you hear what they do not say, you see what they think they are hiding, you guess their most secret designs. What makes so many men seem duped is not that they are in fact, it is that they want to pretend to be. Why? Because they love. To proclaim that one has discovered the betrayal would force a break. One has the cowardice—for they are charming, especially the most perfidious—not to confuse them so as not to lose them. They are so pretty, these mouths that lie so badly! But, that they lie, we know well; and I, who speak to you, affirm, without believing myself as perceptive and fertile in stratagems as the ingenious barber Figaro or the subtle god Loge, I affirm that the woman by whom I shall be deceived has not yet tied her garter above her knee nor gently paled with a cloud of velvet the fresh pink of her cheek. It was too much! and without thinking of what was culpable in my indiscretion, I cried out: –The one you love now, is it Lucienne Thuriot? –Yes. –Blue eyes, very pale, where innocence dreams? –Yes. –Brown hair, a little tawny, which curls up in curls at the temples?
–Yes. –She has, among other hats, an otter cap where a bird of paradise nibbles a bouquet of cherries? –Yes. “She has, among other dresses, a Hungarian blue cloth dress, which clings well and holds her with jealous tightness? ” “Yes. ” “Well! Your Lucienne, I saw her this morning, two hours ago, in the middle of a jam of carriages, in a cab with the blinds half-drawn, where a very young young man, with long, very blond hair, was speaking very close to her ear while holding her hands! ” The extraordinary man burst out laughing. “It’s impossible,” he said. “I saw her! ” “No.” “With her ingenuous azure eyes! ” “No. ” “With her slightly red hair, which curls! ” “No. ” “With her toque which is giving a bird cherries to eat! ” “No. ” “With her Hungarian blue bodice which caresses her closely! ” “No. ” “I saw her!” I tell you; and, blushing all over, she brushed a kiss against the pale golden hair of the one she prefers to you. “No, no, a thousand times no!” Then he added: “But even if you had not been deceived by a resemblance, that would in no way invalidate my theory, which is absolute. Betrayed, fine, betrayal is always possible, but not deceived! Since, in a moment, barely back home, I will be warned of Lucienne’s fault, if she has committed one, by a very curious clue, I assure you, and one that is enough to satisfy a perceptive jealous person. ” “Warned? How?” “Thanks to a little precaution that I have taken every morning for three years. ” “A precaution? Useful.” However eager a woman may be to get to an appointment, I imagine she doesn’t rush there in the pink satin mules she puts her bare feet in when she gets out of bed? Now, under the heel of one of the boots that Lucienne is accustomed to wearing for social visits or for walks, I stick, as soon as I get up, with a white sealing wafer,–without anyone knowing!–a single black hair, one of my own hairs. It’s impossible to take a few steps in these boots without the hair, by the friction of the steps or the street paving, being torn out, disappearing! So all I have to do, when I get home, is to glance at the telltale heel, to know whether Lucienne has left the house or not . “Vague proof!” I interrupted. A woman can go out, without, for that… –I do not admit that a woman should go out, without my knowledge, innocently! –Very well! and your precaution, I admit, is quite ingenious. But are you quite sure that Lucienne has not noticed the trap you are setting for her? –Absolutely sure! Now, will you do me the favor of accompanying me home? We will check together whether the hair is still or is no longer under the heel of the boot. When I arrived at the extraordinary man’s house, he showed me in and left me in a drawing-room where Lucienne was sitting near a window. She greeted me timidly with a nod of her head, and quickly lowered her eyes. Tall, pale, with such a modest air, sewing busily, one would have said, so innocent and busy did she seem, of a sort of angel, who would be a good housekeeper. It was she, no doubt, that I had seen in the cab; but, faced with such modesty and simplicity, I almost hesitated to recognize her; it seemed impossible that those long, cold-white hands had trembled under ardent embraces, that guilty kisses had dishonored those pure, slightly pale lips. My host called me from a neighboring room, where I hastened to join him. He came to me, radiant. He had between the fingers of his left hand and was showing me triumphantly with his right hand , a boot heel, on which a single hair was stuck by a white, intact sealing wafer! I was defeated, I bowed. And, although he had somewhat irritated me just now, I did not think it appropriate to point out to the extraordinary man that the hair attached to the heel of the boot by an intact sealing wafer was a very long blond hair. CIGARETTES Chapter 13. “Well,” asked Lila Biscuit, entering Colette Hoguet’s room as the Saxon clock struck noon , “what has become of it? Are you delighted, are you disappointed? Did yesterday’s lover prove himself worthy of your trust, or do you already regret having been merciful to him? ” “See for yourself,” said Colette Hoguet, revealing, with a half-yawn, as pretty as a smile, all her fresh, sharp teeth. Lila lowered her head toward the night table, where the ends of two pink cigarettes lined up on the marble among the fine scattered ashes. “What!” she said, “only two cigarettes?” “And yet,” sighed Colette, “I think I was a little too hasty in smoking the second. ” “Oh! that’s quite mediocre.” What appearances can we trust from now on? But this would seem incomprehensible if I did not reveal to you without delay a mania, more ingenious than ingenuous, to which Colette Hoguet shows herself singularly attached. Each time she is fully satisfied with a kiss she has allowed, fully satisfied or almost,–having indulgences, knowing how to make allowances for the inevitable disagreements,–she lights and smokes a cigarette; the void left by the exhalation of the supreme sigh is immediately filled by a papelito; and, the next day, she estimates, from the number of precisely arranged scraps of pink paper, the tender and firm value of the nocturnal companion. Chapter 14. For Colette Hoguet is a formidable person. Fresh and healthy,. a bit of a doll, since it must be, but a woman above all, she does not understand that one goes to heaven by four paths, wants to know only one, which she judges to be the best because it is the most direct, and deplores, determined to the simplicity of the good way, the cheating of the paths. There is in this Parisian woman something of a naive and rough peasant. She has a horror of subterfuges, of restrictions. Frankly thirsty, she could not accommodate herself to the drop-by-drop. She has sudden bursts of tenderness, like taking possession, which flout methodical flirtations; the only kneelings she tolerates are those which get up very quickly until they join lips to lips; her bed takes pity on the chaise longues. Other lovers are amused by prolonged beginnings, no completion should follow them, delight in disappointed expectations, approve of man feminizing himself to the point of inequality and mishap in pleasure. You can triumph with those, frail lovers, in whom cunning makes up for faltering vigor! If you are not, in their refined hell, the Styx that embraces them nine times, you know how to have the suppleness of Proserpine that is enough for them; an unacknowledged correspondence is established between their disdain for true joy and your inability to give it; their desire, in its perversion, enjoys being always deceived. But fear to confront, oh pusillanimous young men, the love of Colette Hoguet, or that of her peers! He is like a loyal merchant who, in exchange for unadulterated goods, demands to be paid in cash; the equivalent of what he offers, he wants to receive, never giving credit; and it was Colette who, one morning, after three hours of illusory caresses, while, like an insolvent debtor who persists in turning his pockets inside out, the lover still lingered in cunning swoons, cried out, full of contempt: “Well! Sir, I’ll wait!” Chapter 15. “So,” continued Lila Biscuit, “this new experience has not been more satisfactory than the others? ” “Alas!” said Colette Hoguet, considering the two pink ends of the smoked cigarettes. There was a silence. “In your place, I would let myself be loved by one of those poets who celebrate with such wild transports the redoubled embraces.” There are some among them who are not repulsively ugly; and, without a doubt, the love they express so ardently, they must do it very well. “Hum!” replied Colette. I let myself be caught, once, in the trap of tender poems; and I believed in the kiss of those singing lips. Darling! That night I barely burned a few sprigs of féresli, and the love of poets is not even smoke. “Perhaps you had chosen badly?” “Five feet six inches! A cuirassier who rhymed ballads! Judge of the others, Lila. And, after this ordeal, I attempted many ordeals, always hoping. Was there no man, finally, among so many men? Ah! darling, under the curtains of the alcove, the sportsmen dream of their stables, the actors recite their roles and fail in memory, the bankers make promises at midnight protested before daybreak, and the valets themselves,–the supreme resource of panicked society women,–seem to be afraid of unmaking the beds that they will make tomorrow. Canaries that have been put in cages with other canaries, that’s us, and if I didn’t love the sweet enchantment of tobacco burning in rice paper, I would have very quickly lost the habit of smoking cigarettes. Lila Biscuit thought, as much as a linnet can think. “Will we then have to renounce the legitimate hope of being loved?” she said with a very serious air. “No!” cried Colette. She jumped out of bed, called her maid, had herself dressed, ordered the trunks to be packed; and that very evening she left, without having revealed to anyone, not even to Lila Biscuit, the purpose of her sudden journey. Chapter 16. Lila Biscuit was greatly distressed by the absence of her friend. Think of a parakeet that had the habit of chattering on the same perch with another parakeet and was suddenly obliged to chatter to itself . The poor abandoned thing no longer had any taste for anything; it even happened that she found herself ugly in the mirror in which Colette no longer admired herself. She made a great resolution, she began to search for the traveler, throughout the world. Where she went first, by what clues she directed her pursuit, it is useless to say. What is certain is that one spring morning she found herself in a Auvergne valley in front of the little thatched house—a cottage, really—where Colette Hoguet had taken refuge. As Lila Biscuit was about to knock at the door, a peasant came out of the house, a young man, but a peasant, stocky, chubby, gruff, with big hands hanging out of his smock sleeves. She understood everything, and felt very angry! It was with words of bitter reproach that she entered the room where her friend was still sleeping, all her hair untied on the rough canvas pillow . What? Really? This is what Colette had done? She had left Paris, and Lila Biscuit, to flee into this solitude, and she preferred, who? a boor, to so many amiable lovers? Without doubt, without doubt, there was much to be said about the tenderness of Parisians and the vigor of their feelings. But at least they had a pleasant elegance, smelled of verbena or white rose like a woman coming out of her bath; and it was a shame to let one’s fingertips be kissed by a fat, coarse countryman who brought into the alcove the harshness of ploughing and the smell of the stable. Colette smiled, did not reply. “Besides,” added Lila Biscuit with growing anger, “it seems to me that you have hardly gained from the change. ” Colette was still smiling. “There isn’t a cigarette butt on your bedside table! ” “Ah!” said Colette at last, opening wide her mouth where her happy teeth shone, “it’s because I haven’t had time to smoke a single one! ” THE BALE OF STRAW “Ludovic! The door has been closed! ” The door, very thick, made of beech wood, was indeed closed; whether by trickery or inadvertence, someone must have pushed the heavy bolt from outside. As for explaining by what sequence of circumstances Ludovic and Madame de Belvélize found themselves, as night drew to a close, in the fodder loft, instead of being honestly asleep, she, the lady of the manor, he, a guest, in their rooms at the château, that is something I will not venture to do under any circumstances; I dare hope that your curiosity will not demand it of my discretion. What can be said is that the closed door put them in the greatest embarrassment in the world; you would not have failed to be very touched if you had seen the desperate way in which Madame de Belvélize twisted her pretty bare arms out of the lace of her dressing gown. “I am lost! No way of getting back to the château. We will be surprised. Monsieur de Belvélize will know everything. Ah! Ludovic, this is where my kindness to you has led me!” Ludovic, meanwhile, was trying not to lose his head. “Shall someone call?” The farm isn’t far away. –Farther than the castle. My husband, who is a very light sleeper, would wake up before everyone else. Do you think, moreover, that I could tolerate the thought of being seen, alone with you, in this attic, by peasants who might perhaps conceive the strangest suspicions? –I have an idea! –Say it quickly, for pity’s sake. –The door is closed, but we still have a way out. –This window? –This skylight. –We would need a ladder. I would never dare jump from that high. Do we have a ladder? –We have better than that. Do you see this pulley with its rope? –Yes. I don’t understand. –I wind the rope around your waist, I hold it by the other end, I let it slide very gently into the groove of the pulley, and you reach the ground, without any danger. As for me, I will be patient until someone comes to open the door, and I will imagine some way of explaining my presence in the attic. –Ludovic! I would brave the greatest dangers to get out of here; but day is breaking and the windows of the castle are opposite this opening; who knows if one of the guests, not asleep, or a servant, or M. de Belvélize himself, might not see me, in a white dressing gown, hanging from the rope? It is useless, I think, to to point out to you that such an attitude, at such an hour,—and even at any hour,—would be capable of inspiring legitimate astonishment. We could slip away by the door and by the winding staircase which leads to the orchard, but the skylight, opposite the castle, would be of no use to us. —It will be of use to us, however. I will wrap you in thatch; you are so pretty, my dear soul, that it will not be difficult; I will tie everything up, as one ties sheaves, and whoever watches behind a window, would imagine, in the half-light, seeing a bale of straw, coming down from the attic. Once on the ground, behind this bush which is very conveniently there, you will emerge from your golden sheath and return to the castle. —That seems to me very ingenious, and very practicable. Is there no fear that some blade of grass might scratch my cheek or cruelly tickle the skin of my arms, which I am so sensitive to, as you know ? No matter, one must know how to resign oneself to the hardest extremities, when circumstances demand it. Come, Ludovic, dress me in thatch, I consent. Small as she was, and slender, the young woman soon became a perfectly plausible sheaf; even in broad daylight, one would have had to look closely to glimpse a little whiteness among the dry stalks; at the top, the fine gold of the brushed-back hair looked like a tuft of ears of corn. Supported by the rope that Ludovic, leaning back so as not to be seen from outside, let slide very slowly, Madame de Belvélize descended through the air, without jolting; in a few seconds, she would touch the ground; but suddenly the rope became very light in the hands of the astonished Ludovic, and, stretching out his neck, he saw with terror a peasant carrying on his back in the twilight a bundle of straw, moving and squealing! However distraught Ludovic’s terror was, that of Madame de Belvélize was even more so. Who had suddenly seized her? Who had held her on his shoulders between two clinging hands? Someone from the farm, no doubt: raising her forehead at the moment when arms had taken her, she had seen a peasant’s cap on a young face with rosy cheeks. But what did this man want from her? Why was he kidnapping her? Where was she going, on that back? The wisest course of action would have been to name herself, to offer money to the kidnapper so that he would lay down his burden and keep silent about the whole adventure; Madame de Belvélize was in no condition to resolve herself to anything; she was silent now , moreover, curling up, making herself as small as possible; and she expected something even more terrible, which was certainly going to happen to her. Meanwhile the man had slowed down; he was talking to himself as he walked. “Ah! ah! I knew perfectly well that thieves came at night, in the attic. Clever ones! Who choose to rob us at the moment when everyone is asleep. But I caught them in the act this time, and there’s no need to say I’m seeing things. I have proof in the back of my head. I’m going to the castle, I’ll wake the master and I ‘ll show him this bundle of straw, which didn’t come down by itself, of course. ” Madame de Belvélize felt a little satisfaction and a great terror. The peasant knew nothing! It was fodder—nothing else —that he thought he had on his back! Perhaps she should have found it strange that he had not just now heard the cry she had uttered, and that an improbable weight had not warned him of his mistake; she was too frightened to pay attention to these minor circumstances; she admitted without difficulty—knowing herself to be very light—that she was found no heavier than a few blades of thatch. But, at the same time, how she shuddered! It was to the château that she was being carried: and she imagined the expression M. de Belvélize would have, not quite awake, to see her come out in a white dressing-gown. of a bale of straw! She no longer hesitated. She understood that she must reveal herself, come to terms with the peasant who would not be incorruptible; and, already, she raised her head, searching for words, when he began to converse with himself again. –Yet, let’s see, it is a matter of reasoning. Basically, do I have a great interest in proving that thieves are coming near the farm, and in having them caught? I will not be any richer for it, and I will have harmed some poor devils who are perhaps good people. There are good people in all trades. I would do wisely not to concern myself with this matter. Especially since I could very well keep for myself what I prevented them from stealing. It’s not a boot like the others, no (the speaker gave a little sneer that should have made Madame de Belvélize think!), it’s heavy, not too heavy, it gives off a smell that’s lovely to breathe. It must be straw of a very fine quality. As it happens, the mattress of my bed is as hard as stone; what if I replaced it with this boot? I have an idea that I would enjoy taking a nap on it. But, with all that, time passes, and I can’t decide. Shall I take the thing to the castle, or to my bed? Why, I feel like to play heads or tails. No words can express Madame de Belvélize ‘s justifiable terror . “Sir!” she cried, “all the money you want, I will give it to you, if you let me go, if you promise to keep silent about what happened last night.” What was astonishing was that the peasant did not seem in the least astonished to hear his burden speak. “As for keeping quiet, I ask nothing better,” he said, his head turned away, showing in his red mouth a beautiful laugh of healthy teeth; ” but, to let you go alone, I will take care not to, you see. ” “What! when I offer you…? ” “Even if you were to offer me a hundred times more gold louis than there are sprigs in the whole bundle!” And, his neck almost thrown back, he looked very closely, with strangely brilliant eyes , at the pretty pink and blond head emerging from among the thatch. Madame de Belvélize, who was a person of experience, saw clearly in those eyes—very beautiful for a peasant’s eyes—that it would be impossible to make the obstinate man see reason. “Only,” he continued, “I am not the man to refuse good advice.” I was hesitating just now, you can help me out of this embarrassment. Eh? What do you think? Should I take the bale of straw to M. de
Belvélize’s, or to my… –Don’t finish! –Oh! as you please. You understand me, that’s enough. Come now, tell me, what do you advise me? –Alas! she sighed, since you are pitiless, since no promise, since no prayer could touch you… Yes, yes, very beautiful indeed, those eyes that looked at her, ever more lit. –….. I advise you… And how white the teeth were in the fresh, young mouth! –….. I advise you… –To take the bale to the castle? –Oh! no, not to the castle! she said, hiding herself very quickly, blushing, in the broken gold of the sheaf. THE SERVANT’S BARE ARMS “I will not undertake to explain this mystery!” said Valentin. Who would be mad enough, anyway,–given that modern souls suffer so cruelly from knowing the why of so many things,–who would be mad enough to want, even if he could, to give the true reason for the few material or psychic phenomena which still allow us, by their apparent incomprehensibility, to believe in the extra-human, in the hyperphysical, and which are the last pretexts for Dream and Faith? Let us , sad clairvoyants that we are, preciously preserve the little blindness that remains to us ; let us avoid introducing the brutality of reality into the shadows beyond which we imagine supernatural lights or supernatural darkness. If I had the fool who first lifted the triple veil of Isis, be sure that I would give him a bad deal. Ah! the sacrilege and the fool! He has been well advanced, for having seen the underside of the vague transparencies, for having felt the lining of chimeras! Do not hope then that I will seek the cause of the fact which plunged me into legitimate astonishment. But this fact presented itself to my eyes, patent, incontestable; without doubt it had already occurred, and will recur, in other cases, with circumstantial differences, similar to itself however; and we can deduce from it this law—while guarding against research at the end of which we are certainly awaited by the disappointment of some banal fatality—that thought is transmitted from one human being to another without the aid of words, glances, or gestures; that it loses nothing, in this mysterious transmission, of its natural tendency to accomplishment. Yes, the desire born in a person, if it is sufficiently intense, will become the desire of another person who would have been incapable of conceiving it on their own ; and, for this intrusion of a soul into a soul to be realized, it is not necessary that the desirer have the precise will; it is enough—how much this surpasses the disturbing magnetic experiences —it is enough for the sole bewitching force of desire itself. The mind recoils, full of horror, before the possible consequences of this frightful law. There is no innocent heart in which the most shameful appetites cannot blossom by the mere fact of a dangerous proximity of which nothing warns it! It is like a damnation without temptation. One can become the accomplice of a criminal who has not thought of taking you as an accomplice: he was passing near you, that is all, thinking of his crime, and of his plan, which he hid, you made your plan; you are the innocent thief of the bad thoughts of others. An infamous lust for prostitution can trouble the most chaste of virgins because a girl, on the other side of the closed windows, goes back and forth anxiously from one street lamp to the other; and the most honest guest, seated at the table of a poisoner, opposite the future victim, will watch for the moment to pour the poison into a glass, and, who knows? perhaps will pour it! You shrug your shoulders, you judge me mad? Listen. It goes without saying that nothing is imaginary in the story you are about to hear; it would not be worth inventing ; and it is to its truth alone that it owes its being strange,–and terrible. Married for a month, I adored my young wife, because she was frail and pale with light golden hair that placed on her forehead, on her eyelids, on her neck, caresses trembling with the sun, but I adored her even more because of her childlike candor and the little white rose, almost unopened, which was her soul. Truly one had to believe that her guardian angel formerly took care to block her ear or her eyes with the tip of a wing, each time a slightly bold phrase escaped someone, or each time a word a little less ingenuous than the others appeared in the naive lines of the book she was reading; for, of all that is evil here below, she had learned nothing. If daisies had a voice, they would speak as she spoke; I mean the most ingenuous daisies, those who do not know why they are plucked. As a woman, she had retained, still so troubled by marriage, all the fear of virgins; timidly consenting to my intoxications, astonished by my joy. What would have pleased her most,–although she loved me, in her own way,–would have been that my kiss, in the evening, on her forehead, at the door of the marital chamber, had not been followed by other kisses sweeter , more frightening; while sitting near her before the mirror, I would undo her hair, she would turn her head away so as not to see in the mirror the redness she felt rising in her cheeks. She was even ashamed of her modesty. I, holding my too-hot breath, hardly daring to say: “I love you,” so much was I afraid that at these words wings would come to her and she would fly away, sometimes moving away for fear that she might already sense in my approach a threat of an embrace, I surrounded her with reassuring words, caresses that barely touched, resigned expectations; and, tired of the guilty loves of the past, it was like pure water after the pepper of adulterated alcohols, to finally hold her in my arms, all slender, her breasts a little cold, shivering, ready to flee; her love reassured me, like a freshness. Now, once, we were having lunch under a tree in front of the little house in the fields where our happiness was sheltered. I was not much concerned about the dishes presented to us by a fat peasant woman with tousled red hair, a sort of inn girl whom we had taken into our service. I contemplated my wife, ecstatic. Dressed in snowy muslin among flights of butterflies, her golden head laughing in the sun, one would have said that the white butterflies were a bit of her dress, flown away, and that the rays were her scattered hair; I admired above all her eyes, in which not a bad dream had left its shadow, her eyes purer, more transparent than the azure of the little lakes where the blue of the morning is reflected! I stretched out my hands towards her small, frail hands….. The bare arm of the maid who was changing the plates,–a heavy, fat, firm arm, where the skin was reddening in places,–passed close to my lips , almost touching them, and I felt a heat in my cheeks, my eyelids, my temples! This flesh, near my mouth, with its resistant fullness and its smell of healthy meat, had suddenly made me hungry; I had in my teeth this need to bite, an exasperated bulimia. What was happening to me ? Was I mad? Our maid, with her bare arms, I had seen her twenty times, a hundred times, without noticing; beautiful girl? Not even; her face tanned under a shock of red hair, her neck thick and short, enormous breasts moving in an unbleached linen shirt. And an abject lust seized me at this hour, for no reason? What! brute beast, I was thinking of that girl, near that angel? Full of shame, I closed my eyes, so as not to see,–so as not to have seen; then, opening them again, I seized my dear wife’s hands, I began to speak to her, very quickly, saying that I loved her like mad, that she had never been so pretty as this morning; and I considered her very close, even closer , by an instinct to wash my glances in her eyes. She answered me in her sweet childish language; her fresh little hands were gentle to the fever of my fingers. Well! no, I’m lying, I didn’t feel that freshness, I didn’t hear those words, I didn’t see those eyes. In spite of myself, my heart overflowing with self-contempt, I thought of the servant going and coming behind me, to her alone. I certainly didn’t look at her! For nothing in the world would I have looked at her! But I still had before my eyelids the vision of her bare arms, and now of her tanned face beneath the redness of her horsehair, of her broad neck, of her enormous breasts swaying in the canvas. It was stupid , and it was infamous. No matter, I wanted her! Yes, this girl. It seemed to me that I would groan with joy if, leaning back , I bumped into the rebound of her throat. Hallucinations came to me: a hand-to-hand struggle, she and I, in the straw of a stable, not far from the lowing cow, under the roof beams where cobwebs hang; a chase through trampled wheat, and our fall onto piles of broken ears, and the rage of my bite on her arms, and my hands full of her throat. My wife could not notice anything, so much did I redouble my kind words, so much did I have, apparently in control of myself, the smiling air of a husband. charmed, the small attentions also of an eager host who offers a drink, asks if one wants more of a dish. But desire, the brutal and imbecile desire, was exacerbated in me with a desperate violence, and finally it became so furious, so irresistible… that my wife,–my pure and sweet wife,–rose abruptly, threw herself towards the servant, with full hands seized her arms and bit her throat with kisses, as I would have done! as I would have done! Then she recoiled with a cry of terror, after my desire was fulfilled; and running near her, as frightened as she herself, I saw in her dear eyes, purer than the azure of the morning, the haggard astonishment of awakened sleepwalkers. THE THREE GOOD FORTUNES With a quick gesture, with a decisive air, Madame de Spérande closed her fan; from her cheek flew, in the wind of the folded leaves, a vague cloud of velvet, which rose, rose, fell again, and stopped, light, scattered, with brown curls, right near her eyes. “So be it!” said the pretty flirt to the three rivals who adore her infinitely; “I agree to abandon my accustomed barbarity. But understand this well: each of you will tell me, without lying too much, one of your love adventures; and, since water goes to rivers, and millions to millionaires, and happiness to the happy, the one of the three to whom has fallen, formerly or not long ago, the most precious, the rarest, the most perfect good fortune, will obtain to kiss, in the presence of the other two, the pink and cruel nail of my little ungloved finger! This is how the oldest lover spoke: “I very sincerely pity the men who do not keep, in some tender corner of their hearts, the memory of having played, very young, with young ladies, innocent games, in the evening, in the narrow garden of a small provincial house! For they have not known the exquisite childishness of love affairs at once naive and sly, of consents which do not know what they consent to, of refusals which do not know what they refuse, of little sorrows which cry, of little sulks which laugh; for they are ignorant of the sharp, almost cutting pleasure that stings the nerves of hearing young girls’ names shouted in sudden flights of joy by other young girls, and the charm of meowing “meow” before a half-closed door when the cat, behind the door, is an angel, and the trembling delight of kissing, between the bars of a chair, amidst mocking or envious glances , all the blushing modesty of virgins on the cheek of a child who is willing! Once, we agreed on a new game; it would be to find a rose that Lucienne—Lucienne, my favorite!—had hidden on her person, in her dress or in her hair. “It’s done!” they shouted to me. Well, I didn’t discover the rose. Truly, I searched—oh! with what a desire, first of all, not to find too quickly!–the long pockets of the skirt, where, in the folds of the handkerchief, a thimble and a needle case jostled; in vain I dared, with the tip of my finger, to part a little the narrow collar of starched canvas, which had put a vermilion line in the whiteness of the neck; in vain I lifted, with breath as much as with my hand, the pale, blond and soft bands to see if the little flower was not hidden in the little ear: I did not discover the rose! I stamped my foot, I bit my lips. I was at once full of humiliation and despair; for they laughed at me, the others; and the price of the find would have been a kiss from Lucienne! Furious at having had to “give up,” I withdrew to the bottom of the garden, pacing back and forth, sullen, under the bower all crossed by the moon. But Lucienne slipped away and came to join me. “You’ve been looking for the wrong thing,” she said, opening her divine red mouth, where the flower blossomed like another flower barely larger. And she did not forbid me to pick with my lips, between the snow of her teeth, the delicious rose all damp with an ineffable dew!” “Good fortune is pretty and fresh like a bouquet of bluebells . But he who hears only a bell hears only a sound,” said Madame de Spérande. The second lover told this story: “While from the bottom of a bathtub, behind the resounding slap, I saw, on the evening of the premiere, the characters created by my fantasy living and moving in the real chimera of the stage; while my verses—those verses written in the fever of happy nights!—sounded their triumphant rhymes amid the great silence that approves or the fury of applause, I did not think of my work, no, nor of success, nor of glory! All my thoughts, all my senses, all my vital forces, converged towards the extraordinary and magnificent actress, through whom my drama became life, through whom my words became a song! At rehearsals she had hardly satisfied me; indeed, we had sometimes quarreled quite heatedly; I had hardly seen that she was seductive, and so beautiful! But there, in the warm apotheosis of the theater, trailing her gold brocade dress with a sonorous noise for long periods, laughing the red laughter that wants kisses, raising beautiful bare arms that impose the caress, tall, plump, white with sudden reddenings of blood under the living snow of her shoulders and throat, she was indeed, in the splendor of criminal loves, the formidable Italian courtesan of ancient times, such as I had thought of her, the heroic female of cardinals and popes! I loved her, too, like the hero of my work, I loved her, I loved her! Above all brows, through all breaths, the light of her beauty, at the back of the dark box, flooded me, dazzling me, and I became intoxicated, despite the distance, with violent scents of flesh, like a man who would stuff and roll his head in a bouquet of women! When the curtain fell, I fled. I cared very much to hear the glorious acclamations with which my name was hailed! And I did not go up onto the stage. If I had entered the foyer, if I had seen, up close, the admirable actress who had realized my dream as a poet, the adorable woman who had made me forget it, I would have rushed toward her, I would have embraced her, carried her away, carried her away! Mad, I feared being ridiculous, and absurd. I ran through the streets, without knowing where I was going. The embrace in which she had held the young man in love in the room while he was dying , I had it around my body, like a living and fierce belt, from which nothing would now deliver me. There were stars in the sky? No, her eyes! And the fury of the passions which had sprung from her eyes, which had projected themselves, wild, in the passion of her gestures, which had deliciously rasped in her dying voice, pursued me, hounded me, caught up with me, seized me with the roughness of hands which seize you by the shoulders. Finally I returned home, all full and all enveloped in her. I noticed with surprise that the door of my apartment was open; and, scarcely had I crossed the threshold, when I saw her, there, waiting for me in her royal costume of a Roman courtesan, and that, in a luminous spread of gold brocade, she placed around my neck the imperious caress of her burning bare arms! ” “That is a fine adventure!” said Madame de Spérande; since you have had the rare fortune to possess, in a woman, the incarnation of your dream. I do not hide from you that you have some chance of winning the agreed prize. The last of the rivals told this story: “As soon as I was seated in the carriage, I remained under the spell. Beside a fat and gentle man, quiet, – her husband evidently, – a young woman in black was reading, with an attention that thinks of something else, the a novel from a magazine. A bourgeois woman, certainly, for no refinement distinguished the modesty of her attire; the gloves on her two long hands—grey suede gloves—had only two or three buttons; the veil, neither too far nor too little lowered, revealed two thin lips, barely pink, which did not part, stern. But the whole sky—the sky as it appears to us at sixteen, pale blue, where flocks of angels pass—was visible, adorably, behind the lace, in her eyes. I suddenly felt that I was in the presence of the one I had always hoped for without ever meeting, the one whom, having finally met, I would love eternally. And, something analogous to what I felt, she felt. Don’t believe me , I consent! Mock, mock! I tell you that, our eyes having met, there was under her eyelids an awakening like that produced by the entrance of a torch into the half-light of a room; and, without her having turned away for a moment, without her having tried to fight against a charm too strong, the tender resignation of a smile which never left her lips, finally half-open, admitted to me that she accepted her destiny. When her husband, at the last station, got out to ask what time the train would arrive in Brussels, I took both hands of the young woman; she did not withdraw them! and, simply, almost aloud, she said to me, without my having spoken: “I will be tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, at the church of Sainte-Gudule.” I did not even answer her. She knew all that I could have answered.
Oh! How sweet was the last hour of the journey, while , the fat and gentle man having fallen asleep, we looked at each other, vanquished, ecstatic, eyes into each other! How delicious was also the night that preceded the moment when I was to see her again in the church. My life was beginning again. Nothing that had existed existed. Even memory was abolished. I loved for the first time; I was building the enchantments of a thousand dreams. This woman, so like my supreme ideal, whom compassionate destiny offered me, I would carry her far, very far away, charmed, and we would know, on the banks of some river, in a little house where flowers and birds climb, the perfect solitude of silent love! Long before the appointed hour, I was waiting for her at the church. That she would not come was the only idea I could not have. Had she not promised herself in the first glance? Had she not given herself away in the first word? I had on my lips the kiss that she had not given me. Yet she did not come! In vain I looked one by one at the women who entered the church; she did not come, she did not come! When, on my return to the hotel, I inquired about the travelers who, the day before, had arrived at the same time as me, I learned that the husband, through a whim, or through some jealousy, had wanted to leave early in the morning; and since then, alas, I have not seen her, I have never seen her again!” The two rivals of the last storyteller burst out laughing. “What a pleasant piece of good fortune, indeed! It is a rather poor adventure in love, a rendezvous where the lover does not come.” But Madame de Spérande silenced them with a gesture. –You were happy, certainly, you who kissed, between snowy teeth , the flower of childish love, and you who embraced your supreme chimera; but he was happier still, he who, having loved desperately for an hour, did not know that irremediable sadness: the realization of his dream! And it was to the third storyteller that Madame de Spérande, between two waltzes, granted the rare and dear glory of kissing, in the presence of the two vanquished rivals, the pink and cruel nail of her ungloved little finger. ROSETTE’S REVOLVER Chapter 17. Rosette Mirliton got up early in the morning. Just think, he is… Barely ten o’clock! Rosette is the flowery name her mirror suggested; Mirliton is the childish name she brought back last year from the festival at Saint-Cloud. Small, snug in her gray cloth dolman, she goes along the houses, fast, trotting tiny, like a mouse in a hurry. A wet summer morning laughs and cries around her; the sun, a blade of gold, embroiders with gold the scattered muslin of the mist. Cartloads of large red strawberries and shining cherries, fresh roses in clumps and poppies rustled by the wind, carry through the luminous grayness of the street from the corners of orchards and fields. Mademoiselle Mirliton walks ever faster. Raindrops have put a diamond dew on the black flowers of her veil. Where is she going like this, on foot, the polished tip of her boot soiled with a little festoon of mud? To her rehearsal? No, not PRINCESS CHARMING, that fairy tale where she fills the role and the swimsuit of the third shrimp,—the swimsuit much better than the role—does her best every evening, and we haven’t yet read the great geographical play by Messrs. Jules Verne, d’Ennery and Paul Ferrier. To a rendezvous? Not in the least; don’t take her for one of those little bourgeois women who devote the hypocritical hour of the market to sly and rapid adulteries ; Rosette doesn’t love before evening: her heart, and the rest, lights up with candles. Perhaps she got up, greedy, to go and buy herself the milky cheese that melts in its wicker wrapper and where the bleeding wild strawberry is crushed among the floured sugar , – the white and pink breakfast of a cat or a Parisian? No, she doesn’t spare a glance at the dairymen’s shops. Perhaps she gave in to the demands of some haughty couturier who claims that his customers come at dawn, and on an empty stomach , to try on the narrow, well-tailored bodice, which clings like the green envelope of an unopened flower ? No, if she went to the couturier, she would pay attention, with an air of disdain, to the banal elegance of the ready-made dresses that clutter the shelves of the already open novelty shops. She goes straight on her way, busy, with decision. On the boulevard, she stops, goes into a gunsmith’s shop, chooses a revolver—tiny, cute, the stock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the barrel shining like a cat’s nose with only one nostril—has it loaded in front of her, stuffs it in her pocket, leaves the shop, and gets into a carriage, shouting to the coachman: “To the Bois de Boulogne, very quickly!”
Chapter 18. For she wants to die. To die like Mademoiselle Damain in Vienna, like Mademoiselle Gabrielle Roux in Athens! Ah! One may be frivolous, having had twenty loves that flew away after barely settling down; one may be one of those who brazenly show their legs in the orchestra seats and their throats in the proscenium; a day comes when the heart is taken, for real, and breaks, for real! It is the second alto in her theater, whom she adored, Rosette. Why? She never really knew. Because he was handsome, or because he was ugly; because he always looked at her with eyes that were dying of tenderness, or because he didn’t pay attention to her, not at all. What did the cause matter? She loved him, gently, ardently, and she was very happy, for three months. To be entirely his, she dismissed, with a shrug of her shoulders, as if to say: “I couldn’t care less about you, come on!” two very serious men, one whom she received every day, the other who came to see her twice a week. She lived honestly, poorly, selling her lace, pawning her jewelry; sometimes uncertain of tomorrow’s lunch. She didn’t care about that uncertainty. Before the next day, there was the night, the night so good and so tender, with all the caresses, with all the Kisses! But now the viola loves another woman, ugly, not young, thin, with sharp bones, a board with nails in it. And stupid at that. Left for a crane! Rosette is suffering terribly. Nothing but memories , not a single hope. That’s why she’s going to kill herself. A year ago, when vitriol was fashionable, she might have disfigured the unfaithful lover—the woman, no, no way to make her uglier ! But these things are no longer done. We mustn’t make ourselves ridiculous. Before this evening, at the hour of the Bois, people walking will find behind a tree poor little Mirliton, lying on her back, dead, a bullet in the heart, very pale, still pretty. They’ll put her portrait on the front page of the illustrated newspapers. Chapter 19. She sent the carriage back. She’s alone, leaning against an acacia, in a clump, not far from the drive. As it is early, no one passes by. No sound, except for branches being stirred, or finches escaping, shaking the leaves. Under a wooden bridge, with a single arch trimmed with bark, a stream flows, green and gold, where the fallen trees tremble in the light and in the water, where the birds pass by, showing their bellies, as if they were planking. All around her there is a sweet and charming life, with solitude. It is much sadder to die when the sun is shining! Death seems blacker then. Then she thinks that she is so young, twenty-two, and she found herself so pretty this morning, putting on rice powder in front of the wardrobe mirror, as she got out of bed; her chemise sagged a little, revealing, on one side, her white breast which swells and blossoms with a little rose. She also remembers the joys she has had, that she might still have. It’s funny, when you go on stage, to see all the spyglasses trained on you; and your comrades are furious! Dinners aren’t always boring; the champagne puts a light gold in the glasses; afterward, they push the table into a corner, and they dance to the piano. Will she not have dinner again, will she not dance again? With her veil raised, she considers the little revolver encrusted with mother-of-pearl. She is very pale. She is afraid. It must hurt a lot, the bullet entering the flesh. She trembles, she is going to drop the weapon… no, she holds it, vigorously! She can no longer live, since her lover has deceived and abandoned her. Doesn’t she have as much courage as Mademoiselle Damain or Mademoiselle Roux? She will show that she is strong, it’s decided, she will die! One thing worries her. She has never used a revolver. What if she doesn’t know how to shoot, or if, being clumsy, she shoots badly, and even hurts herself? She thinks she’d better try an experiment, to learn. She aims as best she can at the trunk of an oak, a little far away, among some tall brushwood, pulls the trigger, very slowly, and the shot goes off. A scream! A terrible scream! She has wounded or killed someone, there, behind the bush. She rushes forward, she searches, she stops, stupid with horror. A young man, whom she doesn’t know,—very young, charming, well-dressed,—is lying on the broken branches, motionless, his eyes wide open, one hand clutching his heart. He’s dead! Help! Help! She calls, she comes and goes, doesn’t know what to do, is like a madwoman, bursts into sobs, faints, wants to hold on to the trees, falls, unconscious, on the young man she has killed, believes that she too dies, an innocent murderer. But in her unconsciousness, as in a sleep mixed with dreams, it seems to her that she feels the heart of her victim beating, that arms, very lovingly, embrace her, that a voice, laughing a little, says in her ear, with a kiss: “The bullet broke a branch above my head, I’m not dead at all, and you are very pretty!” Chapter 20. An hour later, they leave the clump to go to lunch at the Ermenonville pavilion. Rosette Mirliton didn’t think to look for the revolver. It remained hidden in the grass, or stuck in the ground, loaded with five more bullets. Someone will no doubt pick it up someday. A passerby, who wasn’t thinking of dying, full of hope, joyful. Who knows? Looking at the revolver, he will become pensive, perhaps, think of the nothingness of living and loving; and, because this weapon will have been there, offered, like a sweet and sad piece of advice… For opportunity is the mysterious temptress of our weak wills. ONE DOES NOT PREVENT THE OTHER . You are a soul, and you are a beast. You have a forehead, and entrails. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter, there is no divinity you do not attain, no animality below which you do not wallow. Meditate on the symbol of the ecstatic hermit and his abject companion; you are, in a single person, the saint and the pig; you have your heaven and your trough; you magnify and you groan. In the edifice of creation, part of what you are inhabits the attics, near the stars, the other part the basement, near the sewers. With the hunger for ambrosia, you have the appetite for filth. An error of modern science is to deny this indubitable duality that religions consecrate; and your error, almost a crime,—a crime remittable because of its very frequency, but fertile in detestable results,—is to want to reconcile, to mix the two beings that form your being, and that you carry within you, whatever you do, like the Prophet and like your doorkeeper. Proud of your thoughts, but terrified of the impulses to which you might follow them, satisfied with your senses, but disgusted with the base tasks in which you might delight, you try to bring them together, lowering one, raising the others; you want to put them on a level; you resemble the Dorine in the comedy who takes the hand of Marianne and takes the hand of Valère: woe to you if the two fiancés—who hate each other more than you think—join, and if the play ends in a marriage. You will have peace, so be it, you will no longer be the battlefield of two bitter hostilities, but at what price! However high the vile half of yourself may have risen, how much, to adapt itself to it, the other, the sublime, will have had to descend! With the aristocracy of your sacred aspirations and the populace of your filthy instincts, you will have made something flat, something mediocre, a happy medium, a bourgeoisie; neither basement nor attic, a second story, overlooking the courtyard; farewell to the immateriality of ever-distant chimeras, farewell to the pure delights of unfulfillment! Farewell also to the satisfactions of sated bestiality! Your two natures, diverse but complete, will have penetrated each other, altering each other, until they form a single one, artificial, incomplete, which will always fail to be high enough and not low enough; with a single mouth, which will dare to be neither an ascetic’s lip nor a pig’s snout, you will pray almost without faith, you will eat almost without hunger. Too few stars, and not enough mud, one soiled by the other however! Absurd, guilty fusion of things that should remain eternally separate. And it is above all in love that the madness and abjection of such an accommodation will appear. What, half angel and half brute joined in human unity, you will be foolish enough to ask for a little dream and ideal tenderness in the kiss of the wolf-girl who offers herself in rut, and, if you happen to meet a child pure and white as a body that would be a soul, you will be vile enough to soil her with a bestial concupiscence? These words irritate you, you rebel, you reply: “What must be done then? Is it not acting wisely to overcome one by the other the two forces that each drag me to one side in a cruel heartbreak? What must be done? You must not correct the divine work, accept, as it is, in its fullness, the fatality of your double nature, be a soul, since you are a soul, at the same time as a beast, since you are a beast, not be frightened by your azure, not blush at your filth, in a word remain capable—for you were born such—of all the flights and all the falls! And, this, you can do; yes, I tell you, you can. Raise your head, ascend, glide, go, be the flying companion of the mysterious angels who pass in the clouds, and pick golden fruits in the garden of the stars, these celestial Hesperides! You have only to follow your thought; it knows the way to its homeland. But do not disdain the earth where your wingless feet walk; on the return of the ideal, rejoice in reality; Sleep, drink, eat, kiss mouths, embrace bodies. You were just listening to the music of the heavenly choirs. Now, here is your food: get drunk. Lover, know how to adore with an incorruptible ecstasy, which would not even dare to kiss the hem of a white dress, the young girls like the Immaculate in the stained-glass windows, and ask from the beds of prostitutes, full of complacent flesh, the supreme breathlessness of pleasure. Poet, converse with the Muses in the sacred wood of Puvis de Chavannes, and sleep with your servant, if she has a beautiful throat. Everything is permitted to you, provided that you never lower your divine being to the contentments of matter, nor that you never attempt, in your madness, to raise your bestial being to hyperphysical joys. Are you two? Be two, very clearly. Do not fear, moreover, to dishonor, by the pleasures of below, the delights of above; your soul is so distinct, so far removed from your senses,—unless you have committed the fault of wanting to mix them,—that it remains absolutely foreign to them, that nothing that concerns them can influence it; you can be at the same time the most chaste and the most debauched of the living! Do not fear any more that the august Beatrice, to whom your kneeling vows are addressed, whose candor you have never touched with a desire nor whose fingers with a breath, has reason to be offended because you swoon with pleasure in the arms of some girl. The kiss has nothing in common with love! She should be no more jealous of it than of a smoked cigar, a glass of champagne in which your lips have been moistened, or any other pleasure, encountered, accepted out of idleness, for which one thanks chance; and even, delivered for a few hours from coarse appetites, relieved of your baseness, you will rise towards her, without ever joining her, with a more fervent and more seraphically subtle devotion! There was never a purer soul than that of Madame de Pasquelis. Like those windows on the roofs, which do not see the street, it opened only towards the sky, and the only things she loved down here were flowers and music. And even then she loved them only in a rather strange way, with a little fright; it would have been very painful to Madame de Pasquelis if someone offered her a large bouquet of roses or if an instrument sang beside her; She delighted in the scent of flowers that one cannot see , hidden behind a curtain, and in very distant sounds, barely heard, that die. Delicate as she was, she appeared very troubled in the world where her name and her fortune forced her to go, and, when one spoke to her, she had, as if waking up, a recoil, with the air of a sensitive person who is afraid of being offended. If she fell in love with a man, she who one would have thought barely a woman,–but one always is a little, and even a lot,–it was doubtless because she had already met him in her reveries towards heaven! There had been between them an engagement of angels. They loved each other madly, with such perfect chastity that their hands never touched, and that, alone, they hardly spoke to each other, judging human words unworthy of expressing their infinite love; and even the glances exchanged seemed to them too crude a form of confession. Now, one night, she was traveling. She had promised her beloved that she would pass, on foot, at daybreak, in front of the house where he lived, far from Paris, on the edge of a wood. She would not enter the house, but he would be at the window, they would see each other, from a little distance, for a moment, and they would keep from that moment a whole long joy. In a corner of the carriage, she was thinking of the happy tomorrow, her eyes towards the azure sky full of stars, mingling her dreams with the clouds. Someone, who was sitting opposite her, – anyone, a traveler, moreover robust and handsome, – was looking at her fixedly, finding her beautiful. He was doubtless one of those fools who believe in sudden good fortune, on a train, by chance; for, suddenly, taking advantage of a bump, he leaned towards Madame de Pasquelis, took her hand, impudently, put his arm around her waist, and put his lips to hers through the bitten veil! She made no gesture, did not utter a word. Under the kiss she had a slow sigh, which does not complain. Finally, when it was daybreak: “Thank you, Monsieur,” she said, adjusting her veil. And, turning towards the window, whitened and pink with dawn, her eyes towards the last stars, she began to think again, her soul ecstatic in immaterial delights, of the beloved whom she would see presently, leaning on the window, on the edge of the wood, whom she would see, from a little distance, for a moment. THE THIRD PILLOW When he first entered Luce Luciol’s large bed, the happy child did not waste a minute considering the Malines that bordered the sheets, the vain blankets of raw Japanese silk, he did not pay the slightest attention to the gold satins streaming down the three steps of the bed, to the slow fall of the plush curtains that fade from dark violet to soft pink. For he had nothing in him, neither heart, nor mind, nor anything else, that was disposed to be distracted by lace or fabrics! His only desire was to hold against him,–ah! yes, fabrics! what prejudice, even muslins!–the dear woman, so long cruel, who had finally chosen him, and he knew, in the desperate oblivion of all that was not her alone, the warm hymen of lips, the embrace with full arms, the warm freshness of skin beneath skin. But, when she had fallen asleep, deliciously weary, with the radiant smile where kissed teeth sparkle, he looked around him, comparing to his student room, tiled, almost empty, with bare walls, this silk room, cluttered with pretty trinkets, admired Luce’s sleep, pink and gold, under the plush, in white jumbles; and, charmed by the beautiful woman, he was flattered by the beautiful bed. Only one thing angered him. Near the alley, beyond the two pillows crumpled by the passion of caresses, there was another pillow. Why had it been placed there? What use could it be? Intact, it swelled, as if waiting for a head, making love duets the threat of a trio. It had the importunity of a useless place setting, which, by recalling the possible arrival of a guest, disturbed the intimacy of meals. The child looked at it with astonishment mingled with anger; although he was certain of being loved, the thought came to him, so cruel to young hearts, of the one who, known or unknown, is always called “the other”! And, with a violent gesture, which would have squeezed the throat of a rival, he seized the empty pillow, shook it, and wanted to throw it away . But Luce, awakened with a little cry of terror, saw the gesture and stopped him. “What are you doing? Will you please leave that pillow alone?” “Why? It’s of no use to anyone. ” “To any real being, that’s certain; but, to anyone, what do you know?” He didn’t understand, she laughed. “It’s used by lovers… who don’t exist,” she said. She leaned on her elbows in the lacy cushions. “I’ve always had it near me at night, this empty pillow, where all the chimerical lovers have laid their heads beside mine. At sixteen, I saw falling asleep on it, after dreamed kisses, the hero of the novel read in secret, the poets of the dear poems; Paul, closing his eyes, called me Virginie, and illustrious hands unrolled my hair of Elvira or Graziella. My maiden bed had two pillows, my young wife’s bed has three. Neither the jealousy of my husband, nor the demanding spite of some young men has made me renounce the proximity of sweet visions. There, on the whiteness of the cambric bordered with malines, the Don Juans and the Lovelaces set the trap for me with their kisses, the Almavivas murmur for me alone the refrain of their serenades, the Cherubim prefer me to their godmothers, and, while the husband or the lover holds me in his arms, Faublas whispers in my ear: “Suppose I hid under the bed?” Each time that a chapter of a love story, read between two visits or reread in my memory, gently troubles my soul, I make an appointment with him, for the evening, on the third pillow! He does not fail to come; although I am not alone, he speaks to me, very low, and it is to him that I make the response that another hears. But the characters, tender or libertine, evoked from between the pages, are not alone in visiting me; I welcome the memories that were realities, the future that will be the present; the one I love often has as a bed companion—near the alley—the one I loved or the one I will love; my new love is aided by past love or future love; I kiss, on the lips of this evening, yesterday’s kiss or tomorrow’s kiss.
It happens to me—oh! the pretty refinement!—to think that I excite to more desire, by the happiness of the one who is there, the tenderness of the one I believe to be there; or else, more simply, thanks to a word apparently escaped, which admits a mysterious presence, I inspire in the real lover a fertile emulation in more subtle delights. This amuses me, and also ecstasies me, this duel of the mouth which bites me with the mouth which I would like to be bitten by, of the true with the ideal; I throw myself between them, like a tearful Sabine; I imagine feeling, if I let their quarrel escalate, the fury of the blows they strike each other through me; and, if I reconcile them, they embrace me in kissing. Sometimes, it is from a resemblance with the one who believes himself alone, that the appearance of the chimerical sharer arises; other times, from a dissimilarity; my whim is authorized by the similarity, or the antithesis. Your youth, this night, perhaps gave you as a rival,—a rival who served you,—a frail adolescent like you, glimpsed, last year, at a window in Stockholm, his head towards his book; unless I preferred you, in adoring you, some robust Basque mountaineer, hairy-chested, running after the bull and grabbing its horns with a vigor that does not let go. Beneath the curtains of my alcove, where truth and dream triumph equally, I have confronted sometimes Menechmi, sometimes astonished sons of different races! But finally, in no case, at no time, have I accepted, satisfied or disappointed, an embrace that other arms have not tightened or loosened, and no man has slept alone with me in this bed where I have tasted more fully, because of your innocence, the happiness of betrayal. As he looked at her, terrified: “Alas!” she said in a slower voice, “did you not know that at this hour the complication of souls forbids them absorption in a will unique, the simplicity of desire? Who, today, thinking of a thing, thinks only of that thing, and, doing it, does not mix with the accomplishment the regret or the desire for another action? Where is she, the ingenuous lover who kisses, only, the lips that she kisses? What I proclaim, others, blushing, would not have the courage to admit. But, child, oh poor child! know this: no woman gives herself, who does not share herself, in dreams at least, and in the bed of all wives and all mistresses, triumphs, invisible, the third pillow! THE PROOF Chapter 21. One night when they did not sleep,–night like all their nights,. for, close to each other, they never slept, she asked him, raising her bare arms from which lace slid down to her shoulders: What is the matter with you, my beloved? Why do you remain silent, with a sad dream in your eyes, while I embrace you and rock you and kiss you? What is it that you lack, and what can you regret, or desire, when I refuse you nothing and would like to give you even more? Am I not beautiful enough? Is not the snow of my breasts sufficiently perfumed under your lips? Or do you find that the burning gold of the sun is redder than my hair? Tell me, speak, explain yourself; for your worry torments me cruelly. Perhaps the princely chamber that welcomes you every evening does not seem marvelously luxurious enough to you with its Sirinagor muslins, and its trembling, here and there, of glass beads that are rubies, diamonds, and pearls? Did the tokay at supper,—while on my knees I watched you dip your lips in the glass that my mouth envied,—seem bitter to you, or were the Corsican snipes not cooked to perfection in the acid sugar of green grapes from Chios? Oh! what angered you, do not hide it from me, child, since I am the one who has joy only because of your smile. The ungrateful one replied, in a sulky voice: —If I am angry, it is because I am not sure of your love. You are more beautiful than all dreams and more fragrant than all flowers. Your room is the sumptuous nest of infinite delights, and supper must have been prepared by those angelic cooks we see in Murillo’s paintings . However, I am not satisfied, because near me, your heart, it seems to me, does not beat strongly enough, because I do not feel, when my hands clasp your arms, the veins under your skin beating feverishly enough. She considered him, astonished. Chapter 22. For the love of this young man who had very large eyes, she. had dared everything, the courageous woman. She had not limited herself to choosing him, she, noble, illustrious, almost Highness, to giving herself to him, so beautiful! In order to please this Bohemian schoolboy who for a long time had put up with the kisses of tavern girls, she had braved scorn,—hardly hiding the fact that she loved him,—and the greatest of perils. For her husband, in his robust old age, was a formidable man. Jealous of the ancient honor of his race, the slightest suspicion would have made him forget all mercy, and he would not have hesitated to strike the adulterous wife, to drag her by the hair with hands red with blood. No matter! Every evening, – as soon as the people were asleep in the palace, – she went out, without fear, her head veiled in a mantle, went to seek in a miserable lodging the lover who did not always deign to wait for her, took his arm, dragged him, carried him towards the princely residence. To avoid waking the servants, she walked barefoot on the cold flagstones of the vestibules. A single noise! and all the servants, awake, running, would have noted, proclaimed the dishonor of the master. She did not tremble. “Come! come!” she said in a low voice. And, until morning, yes, until broad daylight,–should the beloved’s flight be surprised and revealed,–she held him in her arms, intoxicated, in the room next to the one where sometimes sounded, amidst the great silence of the night, the footsteps so close to the husband who could have suddenly appeared, armed, of the husband who would not have shown mercy! Chapter 23. Meanwhile, the lover repeated: “No, you do not know, near me, the fever of desperate love; your breathing is slow, regular, peaceful, your pulse is no more agitated than that of a sleeping child. ” “Oh! Do you think so?” she said. She thought for a moment. “Even if I had to die, I will prove you wrong!” Then, in a commanding voice: “Hide under the sheets, or in the alley. Hide, I tell you, without leaving my hand, however, and, whatever happens, do not move if you value your life.” She gave such firm orders that he obeyed instinctively, without a word; as soon as he had disappeared, his body in the alley, his head under the pillow, she violently seized the bell-rope, which hung in the alcove, pulled it, shook it, as if waking up in terror. A few moments later, there was an irruption of maids in the room, panicking. What was it? What was it? Was Madame ill? Or had she had some dreadful nightmare? The still half-asleep eagerness of the maids came and went, prowling, with a thousand words, with raised arms that did not have time to enter their sleeves. The young woman said: “I do not feel well. Ask the prince to come to me.” Warned immediately, the husband appeared worried, questioning. She continued: “Truly,” she continued, “it is a sudden illness that has taken hold of me and which I cannot explain. I beg you to order that the doctor be notified. ” At a sign, the maids left; the prince stood by the bed, watching the sick woman with eyes full of alarmed tenderness. If one of the folds of the sheet near the alley had stirred, if a movement of the pillow had revealed a guilty presence, the young woman would not have seen the day break, and dawn would have wept to see her, very pale, in the lace of the bed, reddened with blood. The doctor arrived. “Doctor,” she said, holding out her left hand to him—with her right she still clasped her lover’s hands—”doctor, feel my pulse. Is it not true that I have a very violent fever?” The doctor replied after a silence: “Very violent, indeed! As if under the influence of excessive emotion.” “Put your ear to my heart. Is it not true that it beats in an unusual way? ” The doctor, after having obeyed: “It beats strangely, madame!” At these words, the old husband could not suppress a cry, and his strong arms trembled. What was this sudden illness? Was it serious? Mortal, perhaps? “Ah! Doctor, all I possess is yours, if you cure the princess!” But she, smiling: “Don’t worry. It will be nothing, you will see. I feel much better already, and I think that a few hours of good sleep will complete my recovery. ” Chapter 24. “You see quite well that you were mistaken!” she cried as soon as they were alone, with a beautiful laugh of triumph. But the lover, having come out of the alley, shivered between the sheets like someone naked in the snow, said nothing, his teeth chattered; she saw that he was completely pale. Then she felt full of disdain, and she chased from her bed this man who had been afraid while she exposed her life to prove to him the beating of her heart! LILA’S DREAM –Colette! –Lila? –I had a dream. –Awake? –Sleeping. –It’s unfortunate. What! Darling, don’t you know that the hours of sleep should be used solely to rest from sweet fatigue, to make themselves capable of undergoing even sweeter ones? We must abandon to romantic people, great readers of poetry, the love of nocturnal illusions, which are also tiresome, without real profit. Realities, when one knows how to enjoy them, are worth being content with—don’t say no, Lila!—and that one does not use, in chimera, the faculty of coveting them. I rage every time I hear talk of a beautiful dream; what dream is worth two real mouths kissing? Poets spoil women. As for me, I would have the greatest contempt, if I were a man, for a lover who woke up with battered eyes in which I had nothing to do. —Yes, but no matter, I had a dream. —That you are burning to tell me about? —Obviously! And here it is. Lila Biscuit pulled a small puff from her rice powder apple, pink on one side like a peasant’s cheek, and stroked her face with it, perhaps to preventatively cover a possible blush; leaning back in a low armchair opposite her friend stretched out on the chaise-longue, she played with the tip of her bare foot, while talking, with the Valenciennes of Colette’s dressing gown, which were gaping a little under her throat. “I was in a very extraordinary country,” she said, “where people have ideas about virtue that would not be at all appropriate in the world we live in. Imagine that the inhabitants of that country would think themselves dishonored if they married a person who had not had a very large number of proven affairs; and, on the wedding night, all the guests—there are sometimes many of them—enter the nuptial bed one after the other, while the groom goes to make all the young girls in the area worthy of a future marriage. —All of them? You exaggerate. —A few. He does what he can! It is on the number, more or less large, of these bridesmaids—they are called so—that the new wife is congratulated the next day, just as the husband is congratulated on the number, more or less large, of the guests; too few legitimate infidelities , on the part of the groom or the bride, would be a case for divorce. And these people have other customs which are no less singular. Their courts condemn to the most severe penalties young men convicted of having remained insensitive, for five minutes, to the company of a beautiful person; In this case, generally, the husbands or the fathers become civil parties. Couples who return from the nearby woods are pointed at, without the disorder of their clothes revealing that they have done their duty. By police order , women who do not love are required to live in a certain neighborhood, from which respectable families carefully avoid their walks; and in convents or boarding schools, the lives of illustrious lovers who, without ever straying from the right path, gave all their days and all their nights to kissing are offered as examples ! –I imagine, Lila, that, in such a country, you must not have been long in earning a very honorable reputation. –That is what deceives you, Colette! The prejudices that I had carried away from our world, –that very evening, I had fallen asleep alone,–did not fail to cause me great embarrassment; I was dragged into court for not having, within the legal time limit, put my arms around the neck of a passerby who had offered me a rose. –Hey! Why, darling, did you refuse to obey the law? One must conform to the customs of the nations in which one lives. –The way to do two things at once! At the moment when the passerby presented me with a flower, I was in the process of giving one to a young man who readily accepted it. –A rose too? –My mouth. –I excuse you, and I dare to hope that the court showed indulgence for your involuntary fault. –Lenient? You will see. I had to first endure the merciless eloquence of the public prosecutor, which highlighted the enormity of my crime. Not only had I disobeyed the laws of my new homeland—one could have forgiven me for this offense, because of my recent arrival—but I had flouted eternal morality. I had dared not to love those who loved me! In exchange for a flower, I had given nothing, not even a smile! One would have searched long in the annals of the country before encountering such an excess of impudence and rebellion. The necessity of a terrible punishment was imperative. The honor of families, the honor of the entire nation, was at stake . Could one foresee the consequences of an acquittal? Could one affirm that young girls, that young wives until this day faithfully attached to their duties would not find in the mercy of judges a pretext to turn away from the most sacred obligations? If I were not severely punished, one would perhaps see other women, – nothing as contagious as evil, – refuse legitimate reciprocities, not leave their hands in the hands that press them, turn their lips away from kisses, not open their doors, at night, to serenaders; one would hear, something still unheard of, rosy mouths say no! And did one even know if there would not be found creatures sufficiently corrupted by my example, sufficiently shameless, sufficiently devoid of moral sense to confine themselves to the infamy of a single love? At this thought, the accuser veiled his blushing face. He was even on the point of requesting a closed session. To tell the truth, I had the right to object that at the moment the rose was offered to me, I was occupied with honorable and absorbing functions from which it is difficult to distract oneself. A mitigating circumstance, be it! “But, ” cried the orator, “will the accused deny that her fingers, that her gaze were free, if not her lips and her speech? Was it not possible for her to accept the offering with a tender clasp of the hand,—without interrupting the kiss,—or to promise, with a glance, the next reward?” And he concluded angrily with the application of the law. “I tremble for you, darling. ” “With reason, my dear! The jury returned an affirmative verdict and I was condemned to spend the rest of my days in the disparaged quarter where women who do not love are relegated. ” “Poor Lila! ” “Fortunately, the king was less cruel than the judges.” He deigned to pardon me, or almost, giving the reason that a person as amiable as I was would not be removed from society without a great loss to it, and that the justices would be the first to be punished. It was therefore resolved that I should remain free, on the condition, however, of emerging victorious from a test deemed quite formidable. –A test? –The young men of the country would assemble before the king’s palace, I would go from one to the other, without neglecting a single one, and I would have my pardon, full and entire, if they all agreed to proclaim me infinitely pretty and desirable. –There I am reassured. You lack nothing of what is necessary to please. –There were so many of them! –You had precedents. –One thing above all worried me. In what attire would I appear to the arbiters? I will not hide from you, however excessive it may be, that the idea first appeals to me to scorn vain finery and to let myself be seen as the mirror in my bathroom admires and compliments me. That would have been a great fault! Let us be wary of nudity. However exquisite one may know oneself to be, one is not sure of being perfect. Have you
ever heard of a man of taste being ardently enamored of a woman for having seen her coming out of the sea, on the beach, in the costume that reveals everything? There is a little ugliness in the most marvelous beauty. Let us use the troubling mystery of dresses full of promise. It is behind a cloud that the moon is charming. It is true that a moment comes,—and it is not the least sweet,—when fabrics have no more use; but, then, it is too late for the lover to renounce his admiration, even if it is disappointed, and his vanity as a possessor is a guarantee to us of the enthusiasm that he will show and of his own illusion. —Ah! how I agree with you! After a short hesitation, I appeared before the crowd veiled to the lip, gloved to the elbow, and a passionate acclamation proved to me that my cause was won,—in part, at least. —In part? —Alas! there was one more condition to the king’s clemency, which I had not dared to tell you. Not only did I have to please these young men, but I had to admit that I liked them all, and provide them with proof of it in a kiss. Oh! How many were there, Lila? Three thousand. Mercy! In the royal gardens, one sees many groves, narrow, flowery, gallant, boudoirs of foliage, with carpets of moss; as many groves as there are lovers in the country. A matron who was supervising the strict execution of the clauses of my pardon, led me to the cradle where one of the three thousand young men was waiting for me. You can imagine how frightened I was! What reassured me a little was that he had fresh red lips under the finest mustache in the world. I took my trouble patiently. But, from the first grove, I passed into another, into another, into another! and I assure you that nothing more extraordinary could be imagined. –I like to believe that each lover, at least, only asked for a kiss, just one, no more? –Ah! my dear, the people of this country show themselves, in these matters, to a barely imaginable exigency! What is certain is that, in spite of the fresh lips and the fine mustaches,–ah! what young mouths, Colette!–I judged myself entirely worthy of pity… –I pity you! I pity you! –And, certainly, I was about to renounce the benefit of grace, I was about to ask to be taken to the discredited quarter of women who do not love, when, with a sigh more alarmed than all the others, I awoke suddenly! and I was alone, biting my hair, finer than mustaches, on the pillowcase. –A dreadful dream! –Who are you telling, darling! They were silent for a moment. Colette had half risen, and leaning on the dreamer’s shoulder, speaking to her in a low voice through the curls of her neck: –But, now, between us, Lilette, in which grove did you wake up? –In the tenth! said Lila, bursting into laughter. MR. AND MADAME JACQUELIN Chapter 25. When he knew he had been deceived, when it was impossible for him not to believe that his wife had a lover, — the letters, with their familiarity and their tenderness, left no room for doubt, — Paul Jacquelin felt a great relief! Not for a moment did he think of his compromised honor, of his tarnished name. Neither anger nor despair. On the contrary, the Phew of relaxation and well-being of those who fall into an armchair after a long fatigue. He did not completely hide from himself the disadvantages of his new situation: a break-up would not be without some tension; the observations of the family, the astonishment of friends did not fail to worry him; in a year, there would still be people who, meeting him in the street, would say to him: “And Madame, how is she?” That is embarrassing. He thought of the people in the neighborhood, baker, butcher, newsagent, who, for a month, would have, seeing him pass, an air of knowing things, of being interested in them. In certain corners of the provinces, as there are many in Paris, the incidents a little unexpected, which break the monotony of hours like hours, leave a long memory; they make epochs, establish eras; one would say about any other banal fact, a birth, a marriage, a death, whatever, “you know very well, it was three weeks after the day when M. Jacquelin separated from his wife;” and he was not without apprehension because of his old servant who would certainly take on a tender air when setting the only place for lunches and dinners. But how little these minor annoyances, which would diminish little by little until they no longer existed, were, compared to the immense satisfaction of finally escaping from an intolerable discomfort. Paul Jacquelin and his wife, after having loved each other for six months as much as two mediocre beings coupled by chance in the neighborhood can love each other—have you noticed in the publications of banns the frequency of this formula: “same street”?—had soon arrived at a complete indifference for each other; indifference which soon sharpened into spiteful hostility. A continuous boredom, shaken by quarrels, that had been their life for ten years. Married, rich people, who have separate apartments in their hotel, a particular domestic staff, to whom life offers diversions at every moment, can cease to love each other without coming to hate each other; the rarity of their meetings maintains a certain courtesy. But,–because of the cramped living conditions, the indoor life imposed by a necessary economy,–not being able to escape when one has lost the taste for intimacy, being in bodies that cohabit souls that are finally disjointed, being one while disunited, it is thanks to this that many bourgeois households resemble a kennel where two rabid dogs are tied by the same chain. Who knows what a dull rage can continue in the dreams of a husband and wife who fall asleep in the same bed–moving away from each other–after goodnight without caress, and what dreadful chimeras, what criminal reveries of arsenic thrown surreptitiously into the vanilla cream can haunt them at the dessert of meals together without appetite or good conversation? All the yawns from which all anger is born, all the insipidities fertile in bitterness, Paul Jacquelin had known them, for ten years! But, finally, thanks to this blessed adultery, he would be free of his troubles. No trial, no scandal. “Madame, you must no longer stay at my house!” She would certainly consent to this amicable separation, for just as much as he was, she must be tired of the long conjugal martyrdom; and, a few matters of interest quickly settled, he would be free. Free! At this very thought, his heart swelled with pleasure, he breathed deeply. No longer to have, always and so close, this tiresome presence of a bored woman! To eat alone! To sleep alone! Then, considering things properly, he was still young; at forty, hopes are still permissible. One is not obliged to say one’s age. Nothing rejuvenates one like being shaved every morning. There are waters that restore hair to its original color. Eh! eh, who knows? He hadn’t said his last word. To begin life again? Why not? There are young people who readily accommodate themselves to a mature man. No “clinginess,” for example! It would be better to stay married. In short, a very happy man, that would be him. And his good humor gave him the courage to conduct things smoothly. Three hours after the letters were discovered, Madame Jacquelin had left the marital home, never to return. Chapter 26. Ah! my goodness, he began to lead the life of a puppet. “The party,” as they say. Every day at the cafe, at absinthe time, and, almost every evening, at the Folies-Bergère, looking at the girls under their noses, finding that the rice powder smells good. After the show, supper. In a private room. “Waiter, very peppery!” when he ordered crayfish à la bordelaise; and he always ordered some. The life of a provincial lawyer who comes to spend his holidays in Paris. It was the least he could do now that he indulged himself as much as he could. Fasting excused indigestion. But what delighted him most of all was to find the house empty when he came home. Oh! the good sleeps, right in the middle of the bed; so peaceful, stretching out his arms as he wished. In the past, there were always quarrels before falling asleep. Jacquelin had a mania: he could not bear to sleep in a “tucked-in” bed; the grip of the sheets and stretched blankets caused him impatience and even sadness; he felt himself wrapped in a shroud; naturally, Madame Jacquelin insisted that the maid “tuck in” the bed as tightly as possible. Hence the grumbling, which only ceased in snoring. All the sheets in the air now, and all the blankets too! Fresh air, freedom. Good nights! And the breakfasts were charming. The dishes he preferred, he had them made for himself, very greedy, enjoying himself, happy to finally have at the table the place he had always envied, near the stove in winter, near the window in summer. But what was particularly pleasant was to be able to read the newspaper in complete comfort, from the Premier-Paris to the Courrier des théâtres, without encountering, when he turned the page, the impatient glance of Madame Jacquelin, scratching the tablecloth with her nails, and waiting for him to finish, to read in her turn. So that this widower of a living wife spent his days in perfect bliss. And, on the evenings when he did not go to the Folies-Bergère, when he preferred, because of the bad weather, to avoid taking a car, to play a game of dominoes in the little café on the corner of his street, if someone, in the bad humor of an unfortunate draw, took it into his head to make a falsely tender allusion to M. Jacquelin’s “misfortune,” one should have seen with what a smile of disdain and satisfaction he received this vain spite. Ah! for example, the people who pitied him had time to waste. Chapter 27. He was more miserable than stones! In less than a year, he had aged ten years, had become terribly thin; and if he had wanted to dye his hair, he could not have done so, his hair missing. It was not true, this Joy, this air of saying: “I don’t care!” It wasn’t true that he slept well in the unlined bed, that the breakfast dishes seemed good to him, that he took pleasure in looking at the girls or eating crayfish à la bordelaise. A dog that in a mad wandering has fled its master, and that regrets it, that’s what he was. One can break the habit of well-being, of pleasure, of love, but one cannot break the habit of boredom. It is the worst and most tenacious of habits. One cannot extricate oneself from this glue. It is possible to renounce all delights, but to extricate oneself from monotony, from purring, from yawning, ah! yes indeed. Romeo can forget Juliet, but Monsieur Denis cannot forget Madame Denis. The strongest bonds are the weakest. At those very moments when he pretended, lying to himself, to be interested in the things of his new life, his whole thought was turned towards the dull and gloomy past. He was cold in bed, widower! and fell asleep badly, without having quarreled. At lunchtime, he found himself sitting badly, because he had the good place, and he read without interest the newspaper which he did not have the pleasure of keeping waiting. Chapter 28. Once, returning home, he had a great surprise: on the tablecloth, there were two places to eat, and Madame Jacquelin came in, as she had come in last year, by the door next to the stove. She too, she had tried to live outside the ancient boredom! They looked at each other, without uttering a word, sat down, and dined in silence. Then, in the evening, by the fireside, as before, without asking for an explanation, without effusion, and the entrance into the bedroom, she carrying the lamp. They slept well. Since then, the life of yesteryear has begun again, with the monotony of turned backs, angry words, quarrels over the bed made up or the expected newspaper. A return to the penal colony. In the evening, at the hour when M. Jacquelin returns from some walk, if the concierge gives him letters for “madame,” he takes them and gives them to his wife without having read them. THE VOICE OF OLD YEARS It was in the basement of one of those filthy brasseries where the police tolerate people still drinking after all the cafes and wine shops are closed. At wooden tables, under the yellow dust of the gas, leaned the drunken, tired women of the night prowlers who had finished their work and a few men who had waited for them all evening; they, made up, they, very pale and clean-shaven like hams. As we were about to leave, sickened by our satisfied curiosity: “Look,” my companion said to me. He pointed out to me, sitting alone at the back of the room, a very tall, very fat woman, whose tufts of red hair billowed out of a plumed cap. More tired than old, and her throat falling into the loose silk of her bodice, she must have been beautiful, she still was, in the milky whiteness of her skin, in her large, deep, fixed black eyes, where stupor was sometimes enlivened by a remnant of thought. A girl, certainly, like her neighbors; we could see the dirt on the sidewalk at the bottom of her petticoat, on the soles of her boots; but, enormous, and heavily seated with the air of a colossal idol, she seemed, this creature, the exaggerated type, the almost grandiose personification of an entire species. Astonished, we approached. In a very loud, hoarse voice, which rose above all the whispering of the low conversations, she asked us to buy her a drink. She had four glasses of gin served, which she poured into a tankard containing some beer, and drained the tankard in one gulp. Then she began to sing the refrain of a café-concert song. It was a hoarse, greasy rattle, with suburban drawls, a strangled, drunken whine. “Good time!” she said, bursting into laughter. Then, familiarly, she spoke to us. “There’s no one who drinks as much as I do. A bottle of brandy, after twelve bocks, doesn’t scare me, and I never get drunk. I know women who are picked up every night, drunk, on street corners; I walk more upright when I come out of the pepper shop; the drink makes me heavy. But you mustn’t think I drink for pleasure. Oh! Well, yes. I don’t like beer, nor absinthe, nor rogomme; there are times when I would give I don’t know what to swallow a glass of pure, clear water, which would caress my throat and put freshness in my stomach. And, if I drink, it’s not to be amusing with men either. I care about being amusing! I do my job, just barely. I give what I buy, nothing else. Do I have to be in a good mood, to say funny things, to make people laugh into the bargain? That would be the last straw. Perhaps they think they’re amusing me? No, if I’ve gotten into the habit of stuffing myself to this extent, alcohol at three sous a glass, it’s for another reason, and it’s nobody’s business. She spoke quietly now, as if filled with a sad thought, and, half turning away, she took her head in her large, fat hands, tilted it to the right, tilted it to the left, cradling her forehead as one cradles a sick child. Then, although we hadn’t questioned her, she continued without looking at us. “Yes, for another reason. If you want to know, I’m happy to.” tell you. I have to explain one thing to you: the life I lead isn’t fun every day, or every night. Wading through mud from nine in the evening to two in the morning, talking to people on their way home, being nudged with elbows when passersby are in a bad mood, taking off my corset in a hotel room where there isn’t always a fire, going back down the stairs, starting the walk again in the rain, these are amusements I could do without. In the beginning, especially, it was hard. When I was about to go out onto the boulevard, I felt like going out the window. But what? What do you want? You had to eat, didn’t you ? And I’m asking you if I would have found work anywhere other than in the workshop of the four winds? When you’ve fallen where I am, there’s no way out; it’s a glue that holds fast, the droppings of the stream. Finally, little by little, I got used to it. All jobs have something unpleasant about them. Now I’m used to mine. If they gave me an income, if they put me in my furniture, if I were no longer obliged to go out into the street, I might not know how to spend my time; I would miss not being wet by the rain, dirty by the mud, buffeted by the wind, jostled by men. In short, I tell you that I’ve made up my mind, and since that’s how it is , so much the worse, that’s how it is. Ah! only, there’s one thing I’ve never been able to get used to. To get people to pay attention to you, in the evening, you have to talk to them, don’t you think? Well, every time I speak to someone, pulling them by the arm—the words we say, you know them well—I can’t help, it’s stronger than me, feeling my heart ache, terribly, as if I were going to die, and I have all the trouble in the world not to cry all the tears in my body. It’s not because of the words I say, oh! no, nor because of the shame of doing what I do—I’m not so stupid, of course!—but it’s because of my voice, which I hear. When I’ve rested well, when I’ve slept all day, my voice isn’t hoarse and gruff; on the contrary, I hear it very sweet, very pure, as it was in the old days, when I was a girl, at home in the country. It kills me, that voice! I recognize it, it reminds me of the things it used to say. I remember the house, the father and the mother, and the little sisters, who didn’t come to Paris, they, who got married in the country; it also makes me think of the rendezvous I had behind the hedge with the blacksmith’s son, a handsome fellow who embraced me with all his might, kissed my mouth noisily,–you know, we, they don’t kiss each other on the lips,–and who loved me, for sure, and whom I loved too. It drives me crazy to ask: “Aren’t you coming up to my place, handsome blond?” in the voice that said to my mother: “Hello, Mama,” in the voice that told my lover that I would never leave him. I try to speak quietly, so as not to be heard, or to laugh out loud, while talking. It’s no use. I still recognize it, the voice of old, and I hide my head in my hands, and I don’t say a word anymore, and I go away with the fear of being followed, of being obliged to answer the man who would follow me.” With a sob, her large eyes full of tears, the sad girl fell silent. Around us, no one paid attention to this despair; no doubt they thought she was drunk. She added slowly: “That’s why I drink as much as I can. Absinthe makes you hoarse, and so does juniper. After drinking, I no longer have the sound of speech I had in the past. And, by dint of swallowing everything that dries and burns the throat, I hope to never again hear, when I pull the arm of the men in the street, the sweet voice with which I called Mama and which I said I loved to my first lover.” THE HARPSICHORD Chapter 29. However subtly ingenious the Baroness of Linège may be, it would have been quite difficult for her to explain to her husband, in a plausible way, why she was in her chemise, on the second floor of the castle, in the room of the young Slav pianist, as pretty as a woman, with long curly hair! To think that she had undressed, without meaning any harm, because of the great heat, was not to be dreamed of, since it was the last days of autumn, and through the muslin curtains, barely gilded by a cold sun, one could see the trees in the garden knocking their shivering branches together in the north wind. To
tell the truth, the pretty lady of the manor, so pretty with her pointed breasts rearing up under the cambric, could have replied simply that she was madly in love with this foreign musician, her guest for three weeks, who sang such tender romances at the piano, who knew words as sweet as his music; and there is nothing more natural than to confide in her beauty after the confession of her love. But a music-loving attitude pushed to such an excess would not have satisfied the Baron de Linège, a matter-of-fact man, little inclined to artistic enthusiasm; certainly such an explanation would only have irritated him further. The guilty woman therefore took the wise step of not saying a word, and, while the pretty musician, rather sheepishly, played with the curls of her hair, she confined herself to retying the pink favor of her chemise as high as possible; for modesty is in good taste, in the presence of husbands. As for the Baron,—in slippers, in a dressing gown, and the tassel of his cap hanging over his ear,—he remained at first speechless with stupefaction at such an unexpected spectacle; his plump face, scarlet like a Spanish pepper, was more amusing for wanting to be terrible; and, through the panting of anger, his little bulging belly beat like the breast of an actress in a melodrama in the great scene of the fourth act. —Madame! he cried at last, do not think that I am a good-natured husband, whom one flouts with impunity! If I do not kill you, according to my right, it is because I am meditating a far more cruel revenge. You will never again leave this castle where you have not feared to dishonor me; you cease to be my wife, you are my prisoner. No stratagem will elude my surveillance; Far from your lover, far from all pleasures, you will live alone, with your remorse! That Madame de Linège had remorse is not proven, and her husband was wrong to assert it lightly; but she showed herself very sensitive to the idea of no longer seeing her sweet singer of romances, to the threat of being detained, even in winter, even in the charming months of balls and new fashions, in this boring castle, five leagues from Paris, at the end of the world; there was, in the pout she made, all the despair possible in a smile. “As for you, Monsieur,” added the husband, turning to the Slavic pianist, “if my anger spares you, give thanks to my fear of scandal. But you are going to leave here, and I think you will avoid finding yourself in my way! Come on, Monsieur, go out.” For a man in a dressing gown who had just surprised his wife in her nightgown a great distance from the marital bed, Baron de Linège truly did not lack a certain dignity; the young musician, almost a child, Mozart perhaps, Cherubino for sure, bowed his head under the formal order, and he withdrew, not without having cast a last glance at his dear accomplice, not without having also looked sadly at the enormous concert piano, made of ebony, with copper legs, which cluttered the room. He was in the habit of taking it with him on his travels, never accepting an invitation without specifying that he would be accompanied by his instrument. He would not have had the same talent on another piano. But the circumstance did not seem opportune to ask for it to be sent back to him. Chapter 30. So it was done, he would never see her again. Although more than one great lady in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, Vienna, and Paris, swooning over the way he played Chopin’s mazurkas, had kissed his hair, he had never loved any woman—not even that admirable Countess of Loukhanof, so fair, on whom one was surprised not to see angel’s wings—as much as he loved the Baroness de Linège. Oh! the charming hours they had had, a little before evening, when the Baron had not yet returned from hunting; he, his hands dreamily wandering over the keys, she, sitting beside him, listening to him, leaning forward, and dying of languor in the vague rhythm of the sounds. And he also remembered the more intimate joys, where their souls were not alone in mingling, where his lips were silent beneath the close kisses, where it was not only over the piano that his hands, skilled in all the fingerings, wandered . Alas! these delights, he had lost them forever. For the Baron would surely carry out his threats. He would keep his wife locked up; suspicious like the Arnolphes and the Bartholos, he would have the keys to all the doors at his belt, would have all the windows barred. No doubt, Madame de Linège was a clever person; but it is only in comedies that we see the Agnès and the Rosines rejoining their lovers despite the vain enclosures. She would use in vain the most subtle stratagems, she would try in vain to seduce her people who had become her guardians; she could not even write to him, not even let him know that she still adored him, by sending a flower or a ribbon still perfumed with a kiss! It was with his soul full of these sad reveries that he returned to Paris, not by train or by carriage, but on foot, by the highway, – as if to move away more slowly from the happiness of the past, – and, when night gradually came, there were small stars in the sky, but not a single hope in his heart. Chapter 31. Returning home, he was astonished to find his piano in the living room, in its usual place. He questioned his valet, who was lighting the lamps: liveried servants had just brought the instrument, on behalf of M. de Linège, without further explanation. He could not help recognizing that the baron had acted gallantly, in sending back the precious harpsichord so quickly . But he had only a very brief joy in seeing it again . “Very well, leave me,” he said, and, left alone, he looked at the piano with melancholy. How many memories, at this sight,–memories so sweet, and so bitter. Never again would he play Chopin’s mazurkas for her , never again would she listen to them, leaning over, a little breathless with ecstasy; since she was well guarded! since she would not escape from the prison closed by a jealous jailer! He sat down, melancholy, his hands approached the white and black keys; he would experience a painful pleasure in hearing,–in hearing alone, alas!–the airs she preferred… He stood up, crying out in surprise! Not a sound, no, not one! under the pressure of his fingers. What did this mean? Yes, yes, he understood, the baron had broken, dislocated, wrecked the instrument, and was returning it to him, dead, with a detestable irony. Mad with anger, he lifted the ebony board to see the disaster. “Ah! how I love you!” cried Madame de Linège, “and didn’t my husband have a good idea in sending you back your piano? For, instead of the strings and the soundboard, it was there, in the enormous harpsichord, and, raising her head, she was laughing with all her crazy teeth among her disheveled hair. THE ONLY LOVER “Yes, I was wrong! Yes, I blasphemed! Love exists. Tender and violent, chaste and perverse, joyful and desperate, caress and combat, candor and debauchery, laughter and sobs, love exquisite enough not to frighten Beatrix or Virginia, nor myself, formidable enough to satisfy Messalina and Sisina, and myself, true love, whole, perfect, which is all good at the same time as all evil, exists! There are not only false tendernesses, false oaths, false delights. Man is capable in fact of being this kind of God: the lover. For I have been loved, me, finally! Shy as a little child and kind as a mother, more furious than a drunken sailor and more criminally subtle than a melancholic young prince, with all the ingenuousness, with all the devotion, with all the frenzies, with all the artifices, a man charmed me, rocked me, broke me, damned me, and because of him alone I sometimes have in my eyes the look of ecstasy that defies paradise! It was Caroline Fontèje, the beautiful and illustrious poet, who told us this; she continued to speak, still feverish from the day’s work, her voice rhythmic with the memory of the verses. “Do you know my pink brick house in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, and my little garden that climbs the hillside? One evening as I sat alone on a bench in an alley, listening to the dying sounds of nests, leaves, and the slow river in the distance, there was a rustling of broken branches, and from the top of the wall, a man fell in front of me. Hardly fallen, standing up! and looking me straight in the face. Oh! he looked very fierce. Disheveled, with a long, rough beard, no hat, in shirtsleeves. Some vagabond; a thief, no doubt. But by the slightly haggard flame of his eyes, by the bleeding redness of his mouth, he was handsome; I had no time to be afraid, so immediately was I entranced. With his hands desperately outstretched, like someone about to finally seize a long-coveted treasure, he spoke to me with stammers, with rattles of tenderness, of anger too. Everything that human speech, interrupted by sobs, can express of humble love and menacing desire, of infinite respect and insolent fury, he said. He begged and he commanded. The prayer that demands, the outrage that asks forgiveness. I know not what was adoration, but rape. And I had all over my body, like a fluid of imposed hands, the furious and gentle will of his gaze, and I felt that I had never been desired or loved with such brutal outbursts, with such delicate submissions. Wherever you come from, be welcome, O joy! I open my window to the rays of all the stars, to the perfumes of all the flowers, to the lightning also of all the storms. We must not chase away happiness, this too rare guest, because it enters by breaking down the door. Without a word I stretched out my hands towards the outstretched hands of the tender and terrible stranger; and my heart swooned in a delicious languor, while he stammered, his forehead on my knees, his love and his gratitude. Oh! the happy days after guilty nights! Where did he come from? What was the use of asking him? He had come to me; that alone mattered. Who was he? I knew it well: he was my lover. I owed him all the terrors, all the tears, all the smiles. Still exhausted from the ferocity of his embrace, he took me from daybreak to the fields, to the woods, along the river; his arm, which had mastered me, had, around my waist, cradle-like caresses; his voice, formerly so fierce, with the cries of a wild beast, was lighter and sweeter than the song of an awakened bird. We were very childish, both of us, him especially. Charming nonsense, which made me laugh, and charmed me. For a gray lizard fleeing under the grass, he had leaps of joy and he pursued the vanished beast, using his hands to run, like a cat looking for a mouse. Although he knew many things, he must have read many books and dreamed afterward the readings,–he showed singular ignorance, at times; there were very common flowers whose names he did not know; it was necessary to tell him these names, and to explain to him at what time of year these flowers bloom, in which countries they are found especially. Other questions still, about a thousand things. I, to teach him, the big child, to make him repeat the words he had not understood at first, I took on the severe air of a scolding governess. Oh! the adorable lessons! I loved him for being less learned than me, for listening to me with a bewildered expression, like a schoolboy who is astonished. I would sometimes sit on a large stone and, while I spoke, maternal, a little pedantic, he, on his knees, his eyes raised towards me, would fan my lips with a flowering branch, and, at the same time, he would blow on my face to ward off, he said, the madman, the trembling shadow of leaves and flowers. But, suddenly, he would stand up, a haughty joy in his eyes. The child would become a man, the man a hero. With lyrical emphases, with gestures of glory, he would tell me his dreams. So that I might be proud and radiant, he wanted all the honors and all the triumphs. He would be, he was, the victorious prince before whom armies tremble, or the sublime poet whom the Capitols await. He would evoke the festive palaces, full of conquered flags, the public squares from which the acclamations of the crowds rise. And, with pride in my heart, I followed him into the enchantment of his glorious chimeras! We made a journey, on horseback, on foot, whatever, into the mountains, entrusting our love to the chance of sleep in an inn or naps under an overhanging rock. I am bold, he was reckless! Alone, iron-shod staff in hand, we climbed the convulsed immobility of the rocks, or we slid along the wet green slopes. And when, after crossing the glaciers whose cracks are hidden by the crunching snow, we hoisted ourselves onto some peak, he, standing, superb, among the vast height of the azure, he held me, panting, in his arms, and kissed my lips, in the open sky! Sometimes we descended into the cities. Then he became terrifying. Furious jealousies seized him. Because a man had turned to look at me, because a passerby had brushed against my dress, flames came out of his eyes, and his teeth, with rage, ground. He carried me away, hid me, locked me up. I have known them, dreadful and exquisite, the terrors of being insulted, of being beaten by the one you adore, and who adores you, and who, with blood under his eyelids and foaming at the mouth, brings you to your knees under the threats of his fist, and will perhaps kill you, unless he embraces you desperately with kisses that are bites! But his most unbridled outbursts—oh! so dear! oh! so sweet!—had for their aftermath such humble repentances, such tender devotions; he demanded punishments, exacted penances; a guilty pilgrim, before the saint who forgives, it was he; and, to spare me a tear, to give me a more cheerful smile, he would have faced the cruellest death. Once, from the top of a bridge, I watched the green and white water of the torrent foaming among the rocks; a flower fell from my bodice under the passing breath; he threw himself into the gave! and, his forehead torn by the stones, he brought me the flower in his bloody hand. Three months later, one morning, – we had returned to Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, – my servant entered all terrified, with gestures that overturned the furniture, into the room where we no longer slept. The gendarmes were downstairs, looking for a fugitive. The one to whom I owed knowing true, whole, absolute love, the tender and violent lover, perverse too, naive and magnanimous, the brave and jealous lover, and devoted to death, the perfect lover,–the only one lover worthy of the name, yes, the only one, alas! – was a madman who had escaped from the asylum at Charenton.” COLETTE’S REASONS The door opened as if by a gust of wind, and Ludovic, with a tumbling of chairs, uttered these brutal words: – Colette, you are deceiving me! – Ouch! said Colette. And she was so troubled by this apostrophe that, departing from her usual modesty, she did not think of crossing the breasts of her morning dressing gown. Whatever fury possesses you, it is difficult not to take pleasure in seeing two young breasts swelling, out of a yawn of transparency, where a sharp redness is ripening; one can become similar, in such a case, to a child who interrupts his anger to crunch a candy or to bite a strawberry. But a momentary weakness, and the pleasure he found in it, did not appease Ludovic, and, raising his face which had become pink near the lips with a little rice powder: “You are deceiving me!” he repeated with a beautiful tragic gesture. As Colette is a person who recovers without delay from the most intense emotions, she replied with a little laugh: “Well, yes, there, I am deceiving you. ” “With Gontran! ” “With Gontran, if you like. I would certainly have preferred that you had not been informed of it, and I had pushed my delicacy to the point of taking all the precautions capable of maintaining you in a pleasant ignorance. But, since you know things, I have no difficulty in admitting them with the frankness that is natural to me. “Colette! Even after your betrayal, I did not expect such impudence! ” “And I, sir, I did not expect so much ingratitude. ” “Ungrateful?” cried Ludovic with a redoublement of anger. What! Without mercy for the most tender love, you steal from me the only treasure that is dear to me… “Hey!” she said, “one can give to one while not stealing from the other; to share is not to take back. ” ” Without thinking of my devotion, of my heart which belonged entirely to you, you have made a rival happy, and it is I who am ungrateful! ” “No doubt! No doubt! The most ungrateful man in the world! Since you take no account of the sacrifice to which I have resigned myself. ” “By deceiving me! ” “By deceiving yourself. Ah! Ludovic, learn this, although it costs a modest person like me to boast of myself, I acted only for your good!” At these words, the betrayed lover’s stupor was so great that he lost his voice and sank into an armchair, arms dangling. Colette took advantage of this lull to move closer to Ludovic, cuddly—she forgot to cross her dressing gown again!—and, curled up on cushions, putting her elbows on his knees, she spoke to him very close, so close that sometimes with her breath she brushed his whiskers. “Yes, for your own good, Ludovic! You will soon be convinced of it, if you listen to me for a moment without crying out loud or making grand gestures.” He looked at her, still speechless with astonishment. “Come now,” she continued after a silence, “is it true that, since the evening when I did not forbid you to linger in this room, I have not ceased to be happy and smiling, without malice or sulking?” “I agree,” said Ludovic. “So, never sullen, never angry, and a smile always ready to become a kiss? ” “Would you were less charming! I would have loved you less. ” “Have I not had all the submissions, all the complaisances? Is it not the hat that pleases you that I wear most commonly? Did I not give my maid the dress whose color did not seem pretty to you? ” “I remember,” said Ludovic. “And how many other obediences, which you have not been able to forget! Ah! Ludovic, You are a formidable man; even when one has allowed oneself to go to extremes in your favor, you are not yet satisfied; you have demands made to disturb the most expert tenderness; and many times, is it not true? My modesty has had to resolve itself to strange condescensions,—of which I still blush,—so that nothing should be lacking in your imperious delights? —I grant, said Ludovic, that I have not had too much to complain about the rebellions of your chastity; I went so far as to suppose that you shared, in your prompt defeats, the pleasure of my victories. —And, from all that, you concluded? —But—— You concluded, I bet, that I was a little person always in good humor, always humble, always inclined to the most excessive acquiescence ? Ludovic nodded yes. —Well! cried Colette, rising in a lively commotion of surahs and muslins, you have made a complete mistake! Know, sir, that I am, at certain times, very often! melancholic, willful, and absolutely rebellious to tender prayers. I quarrel, I shout, I storm, I have nervous attacks, and, after breaking the Japanese ornaments on the mantelpiece, I declare that I will sleep alone. You thought you knew Colette; ah! yes! or, at least, you did not know her completely. And now, she added, looking at Ludovic with tender eyes, I hope you understand why I had to decide, I who adore you—oh! what a sacrifice! what a sacrifice!—not to refuse to another what I had so much joy in giving you. —But no! I do not understand! said Ludovic violently. —Will I have to explain everything to him? sighed Colette. What, she sat back down on the cushions, more defeated, smelling good, what, you can’t guess what my anxiety was from the beginning of our love? Knowing myself to be bad as I sometimes am, I told myself that you wouldn’t tolerate my spoiled child’s whims, my rebellions, my coldness. To correct my faults, there was no point in thinking about it; I would have tried in vain. Thus, I would soon lose you and you would keep only a bitter memory of me! It was a thought that tortured me. There was a laughing, obedient Colette, in love with you , who was worthy of your tenderness; but there was another, sullen, hot-tempered, cruel, who would not have been long in making herself known, and of whom you would have been tired very quickly. What to do? There was only one way: to reserve for you, the charming Colette, and to get rid of the other one—the unbearable one—by giving her to anyone. If I have another lover, Ludovic, it is to offer you happiness without trouble or disillusionment! It is so that your love will never turn away from me! Everything I have that would displease you, another possesses, and delivers you from it. With Gontran, I am spiteful, nervous, absolute, jealous, full of reproaches and refusals, in order to be able to be with you—with you alone—smiling, submissive, very submissive, isn’t that so? Ah! Ludovic, if you were a just man, you would recognize how much you have wronged me by saying cruel words to me and you would now think only of consoling me for this dreadful necessity of betraying you, to which the interest of your happiness obliges me! It is probable that Ludovic would have found many things to reply to, if he had enjoyed at that moment all the freedom of mind he could wish for. But how can one make a speech, or even assemble one’s ideas in a logical order, when one has on one’s forehead, on one’s eyes, on one’s mouth, curls of golden hair like rings of flame, which slide, scatter, tickle, and ignite the ravished skin, and when the maddening odor of all femininity exhales from the beautiful sleeveless arms raised? “No matter,” he said at last, after too long a silence, “no matter, Colette, all your reasons cannot satisfy me; and, with great sorrow, I still have a great fear. –A fear? Eh! What? –Can’t you guess? –No, tell me. –Well, I’m afraid… He spoke to her in a low voice, in the shivers of her neck. Colette burst out laughing. –On the contrary! she cried. Look, ask the pianists if the harpsichords have less sound because they haven’t tuned them themselves! THE MARTYRDOM OF VALENTIN Valentin, the other day, said to me: “No man suffers as much as I do. I go, I come, I laugh, I tell stories, I enthusiastically applaud Sarah Bernhardt in Macbeth, I read with delight the verses of Sully-Prudhomme or Léon Dierx, I proclaim that Château-Yquem, after putting gold in my glass, puts sunshine in my brain, I admire the exquisite little feet of Rose Mousson, which show spangles of pale flesh through the mesh of the black stocking, I profess a tender esteem for the beating and violent throat of Constance Chaput; finally I behave like a Parisian determined not to let any joy escape, and I offer to the people who pass by the illusion of a happy man. Illusion, indeed! I am dying of pain and rage. A viper has given birth in my heart, and her young bite well, I swear to you! You know the infernal tortures invented by Alexandre Soumet in the Divine Epic: they are caresses, at the price of mine; as the cruelest beds of torture would be couches of roses at the price of my grill! Why do I suffer? Eh! by Jove, because of a woman. Do you imagine that I would do my lost fortune or my last hissed drama the honor of despairing over so little? Comrade, there is no denying it: it is from woman, and from her alone, that all happiness, and all unhappiness, comes. I salute you, Eves and Marys full of grace and terror! As for me, it is the misfortune that I owe you. And my anguish is all the more poignant, all the more intolerable because its cause is uncertain, doubtful, perhaps never existed. The height of horror and heartbreak: it is possible that I am tortured for no reason, that I am wrong to suffer; I am perhaps the happiest of men! This thought exasperates my torment. Don’t you understand? Listen. I have told you enough joyful stories to have the right to impose a sinister tale on you. “Dictation,” I said to him. And Valentin dictated. “A year ago, I was ill. A stupid illness: rheumatism that took hold of both arms and both legs. No serious danger, very acute pains. Nothing could be more absurd. Illness is illogical, has no reason to exist if its result , or at least its goal, is not death. Motionless on my bed, stiff, swaddled in hemp and linens, with continuous little cries that ended up being a long purring melody, I looked like a musical mummy. But I didn’t seem ridiculous to Micheline, she loved me so much. An English humorist said, in better terms: “It’s extraordinary, all that a man can do in front of a woman without ceasing to be an angel to her!” Neither the insipidness of the herbal teas in which she dipped her lips to encourage me to drink, nor the vileness of the poultices and blisters, nor the constant chore of lifting my head and replacing the cushions, nor the necessity of making me eat,–for I had the arms of a paralytic,–nor the long readings, aloud, to distract me, nor the sleeps on the sofa, fully dressed, so often interrupted to offer me from hour to hour the spoonful of narcotic prescribed by the doctor, nothing repelled my dear Micheline. Sullen, repulsive, grotesque, whatever, she pampered me; and as its ideal charm is one that the most humble jobs cannot debase,–having, to present myself a cup, the gesture of offering a rose to my lips, – she brought, into my sick room, closed to the light, too heated, where the air was sweetened with pharmaceutical exhalations, all the fresh clarity and aromas of spring. What completed the kind of joy that I could feel in the midst of my suffering was that beside my friend I had a friend. Georges, – you know him, – did not limit himself to fighting with all his science the progress of the disease: he had for me, this young and already illustrious doctor, a brother’s devotion. It was not enough for him to come to my house two or three times a day; in the evening, his visits finished, he would sit at my bedside, near Micheline; he too would raise my head and replace the pillows; he too, would taste my herbal teas; While Micheline held the plate full of soup, it was he, very often, who slowly put, after blowing on it, the spoon in my mouth; and more than once, in fear of some crisis, he spent the whole night near my bed in an armchair, where one sits very badly. Pampered in this way, ecstatic in spite of this cursed rheumatism which gnawed at my bones, I wondered if, once cured, I would not pretend to be ill again, in order to feel in its fullness the joy of being loved, pampered, rocked by two good and dear friends. One night, I opened my eyes in spite of the narcotic, suddenly, as if someone had shaken my shoulder to warn me; and I saw in the armchair, defeated, panting, Micheline under Georges’s lips. Jump! jump on them! strangle them between my two hands, in their kiss! Both of them! Impossible. The quadruple weight of my limbs held me in the bed; like Charles Baudelaire’s soldier “who dies without moving, in immense efforts.” Impossible even to raise an arm or close a fist, in a gesture of threat! Oh! to be of flesh for pain, and of stone for vengeance! It was dreadful. To insult them, to spit in their faces the disgust of their betrayal, I could at least do that? No more. The voice did not come out ,—no, not even a cry, not even a death rattle,—from my throat strangled by horror and by anger. Motionless, voiceless, nothing. Only my head moved, stood erect on my stretched neck, my eyes painfully wide; it must have resembled, hideous and grotesque, those mobile heads of bronze turtles. And, under my fixed, relentless gaze, which, as it gushed forth, burned my eyelids, they still embraced each other, their hair tangled, tightly, ardently, and I saw them, and I heard them, tortured by the most frightful rage that has ever devoured a mortal, until the moment when the weight of the narcotic, triumphant, forced my eyes to close again and put my head back on the pillow. The next day,’ Valentine continued with a little hesitation… ‘The next day,’ I said, ‘you called your servants and had your doctor and your mistress thrown out. ‘ ‘No.’
‘You kept them? ‘ ‘And I still have them and I will never expel them! For, in the end, nothing proves to me that they were truly guilty. ‘ ‘Eh! No, nothing proves it! I saw, that’s certain, but did what I saw really exist? They are hallucinations. Narcotics have strange effects, they cloud the vision, distort objects. Have you eaten hashish, have you smoked opium? That evening, I remember, I drank seven or eight spoonfuls of chloral; Georges had feared, for me, a bad night. Perhaps I was the dupe of an execrable vision! In any case, this supposition is not absurd, doubt is permitted. Could I condemn, without any other testimony than that of my feverish and frantic eyes, Micheline so tender, Georges so good? No. And here is a whole year that my life passes, envied, between her always more in love, and him, always more devoted; a whole year that I retain this rare happiness of having, with a sure companion, a loyal and ardent mistress,–for a whole year I have been dying, every hour, every minute, of jealousy and rage! For the dreadful scene, which I do not believe, which I do not want to believe, I see it again and again, it is before my eyes incessantly. Each kiss from Micheline reminds me of their kisses, there, in the armchair; each time Georges reaches out his hand to me, I remember that with that hand, he touched Micheline’s cheeks, shoulders, arms. It is not true! It is not true! and I am going to fall at their knees, tell them everything, ask their forgiveness; I dare not: perhaps it is true! Oh! if it were true! I am no longer crippled now; I could rush upon them, seize them, kill them. But no, I am mad! Is it possible that they have deceived me? and I try to smile at Micheline who smiles, so pure, at Georges who laughs, so cordial. It’s abominable, I tell you. To be able neither to hate them without remorse, nor to love them without anguish. Sometimes, for whole days, I watch them, spying on the slightest words, the most indifferent gestures. Nothing, not a clue! On those evenings, I sleep better. But the next day brings back the tortures of doubt. Do you understand now that the tortures of hell are caresses at the price of mine, and that the cruelest bed of torture would be, at the price of my grill, a bed of tender and fragrant roses? THE VISION Chapter 32. They were at that moment in the evening, when, because of the gentle heat. In the tightly closed room, thanks to two or three cigarettes and a few cups of tea sweetened with an island liqueur, intimacy becomes completely trusting, allowing itself to flow, with languidly whispered words, into the most delicate confidences. Madame de Belvèlize, the tip of her boot against the copper of the andirons, her head thrown back on the low back of the armchair, confessed amidst the smoke of the feresli that not everything was absolutely imaginary in the stories told about her; she had more than once been lacking in cruelty towards well-made young men, kneeling on the carpet in her boudoir; and, during her confession, a slight flutter of her eyelids with slightly damp eyelashes gave one to understand that, in her case, regret for faults was not complicated by any repentance. The Countess of Cercy-Latour showed an even less reserved frankness! She loved, yes, she loved, nothing more truly, this Hungarian musician, robust and red-haired like a barbarian, who, at social gatherings, makes the strings of the most solid Érard burst forth under his hairy hands; admiration for such vigor had not been a small factor, she admitted, in her inclination to this choice. Besides, it was possible that she had ventured, after midnight, under a thick veil, to climb in the company of a discreet friend who did not at all resemble the Hungarian musician the stairs of one of those nocturnal restaurants where suppers that are not hungry nevertheless last until the hour of the cleared windows. For, finally, it had to be recognized, despite the convention of decency, there is some delight in the extremity of not refusing his lips; And would it not be very sad, as the song of Venice says, to go away without love on this sea of terrible storms, of tiresome calm, that we call life? “But you,” said the Countess, turning to little Hélène de Courtisols, “you are careful not to abandon yourself to tender weaknesses; Parisian wickedness, however attentive and ingenious it may be, has never found anything it could reproach in you; you are irreproachable, darling.” Madame de Courtisols, who cannot help blushing at every turn, so easily is her innocence alarmed, had very pink cheeks after a shudder of modesty, a sensitive girl who would become a sweetbriar! Then, in her voice, fine and clear as a child’s: “It is true,” she said, “that I know my duties; and even if I did not value the esteem of my husband and that of the world more than anything else, I was born in such a way that it would be absolutely impossible for me to commit, in reality, the most venial sin. I do not judge you, I do not blame you; I am not like the women of today, that is all; it is only a difference, of which I do not take credit. To betray the nuptial vow, in fact, to deliver to a lover what should belong only to the husband, that appears to me as a monstrous enormity to which it is impossible to resolve; I remain honest, without effort, naturally. ” “Ah! how I admire you!” cried Madame de Belvèlize. “However,” continued Hélène de Courtisols, even more rosy, lowering the golden latticework of the friezes over her eyes, like a veil, ” you must not believe that I am insensitive, nor that I am completely ignorant of those delights which make life pleasant. ” “Huh?” said the Countess of Cercy-Latour. “That there is something agreeable in the union of two mouths, and that, in certain cases, one can utter sighs in which desolation has nothing to do with it, I know as well as you do; only I have imagined a way of tasting the sweetness of sin without being a sinner in fact, and I have many loves without doing the least harm to M. de Courtisols. ” These words, as one might imagine, caused the greatest astonishment to the two friends of the honest little woman. “A way? What way? That is surprising. This way, tell us.” “Oh!” How much it will cost me to reveal it to you! You are very anxious to know?… –No doubt, no doubt! Speak quickly. –Well, I…
Madame de Courtisols hesitated, shrinking in her armchair, her eyes completely closed, with the timid air of a boarder who is about to be scolded. –Well… I’m getting drunk! she said. Chapter 33. Such an admission was not likely to lessen the astonishment of the two worldly women without virtue; and, as they insisted that they be told the bottom of things: –Yes! I’m getting drunk, replied the ingenue, blushing ever more. It’s the only way I’ve found to reconcile the rigor of my principles and my natural austerity with the gentle demands that one cannot escape. When it happens to me, in a conversation with some young man who might become too dear to me, to feel dangerously moved, I flee, I hide in the boudoir where M. de Courtisols himself has no right to enter. There, on a table of Portuguese wood, little phials are arranged, various in shape, various in color, and, after a few drops drunk, – you can well imagine that a few drops are enough to trouble my mind and make me as mad as possible! – I feel, very close to me, in the half-light of the perfumed room, the most lovely chimeras that can disturb and charm a woman’s thoughts come to life, take shape, take form. Ah! the pretty moments, without peril, without decline, and what realities are equal to these dreams? There are no more tender lovers than those I imagine, nor more beautiful; They are always as I want them, since it is I who create them; and, without giving anything, I can refuse nothing. In truth, I am like the sultana of a strange harem where the favorites would be favorites. From all times, from all countries,–according to the liquor that my desire chooses,–a thousand lovers come to me, of whom only one is worth all yours. If I have moistened my lips with a sweet wine from Spain, I see kneeling before me some graceful and fierce bullfighter, with embers in his eyes and very red blood, still warm, in the embroidery of his jacket; as soon as I have drunk a little Johannisberg, it seems to me that Hermann is at my feet, calling me Dorothy, and if timid that he dares not touch my lips with his breath; the flame of Greek wines illuminates distant landscapes where ephebes, white as nymphs, swim towards me in the clear waves of the Eurotas or the Cephise; champagne imagines a hundred follies in private rooms where the diamond of the rings has scribbled names on the mirrors; and if, more practically, I have emptied a glass of Bordeaux,–very small, oh! very small,–the most ardent, the most sincere of the black suits in which I have waltzed holds me in his arms, murmuring in my ear oaths that he will not betray. “That is admirable!” cried Madame de Belvèlize with a burst of laughter.
“But a little incomplete, no doubt,” objected the Countess of Cercy-Latour; for, don’t say no, darling, there are moments when dreams cannot replace reality, and, however adorable he may be, an imaginary lover is in no way capable… “That’s what’s deceiving you!” interrupted Hélène de Courtisols. “When I think of drinking a few more drops, something truly inconceivable happens : I hear the door open—yes, I ‘ll bet I hear it—and a man appears… “A man? —Of incomparable beauty! —A man, really? —Quite so, I assure you. So much does illusion have control over me! ” “In what costume? In a bullfighter’s or a German student’s outfit, under the chlamys of young Greek men, or in a tailcoat, according to whether you have drunk sherry, Johannisberg, chypre, champagne, or Bordeaux?” “Please spare me the trouble of specifying the costume.” “Indeed,” said Madame de Belvèlize, “it is a question that is beyond common sense; one cannot pay attention, in a hallucination, to such minute details. ” “However she may be dressed, the vision is the most adorable in the world; and such is the reality of her embrace that I would often believe I had reproaches to make myself, if I were not sure of being alone in the half-light of the perfumed room. But I am sure of it, thank God! And,” added Hélène de Courtisols, who at last opened wide her blue eyes, so pure, in which the serenity of peaceful consciences was offered , “it is a great satisfaction to me, when I wake from my dreams, alone, always alone, to think that I have failed in none of my duties, that I am still, that I will never cease to be, an irreproachable wife.” Chapter 34. Such confidences, between people already inclined to love each other, do not occur without their intimacy increasing. The two guilty worldly women took a very lively affection for little Madame de Courtisols, so perfectly virtuous despite her chimerical failings; and, day by day, this tenderness became deeper , more devoted. So much so that they were as worried as could be to see their friend, formerly so cheerful, gradually sadden , become almost gloomy, like someone who is deeply saddened. “Hey! darling,” asked the Countess de Cercy-Latour one day (it was two months after the evening of the confessions), “what has happened to you, and why do you give in to these melancholies?” Madame de Courtisols did not answer, lowering her head. “Perhaps it is because you no longer get drunk?” said the other with a little laugh. “Hey! Yes, my dear! Only… –Only? –Only things are not going as they used to! From all times, from all countries, I still see imaginary lovers who kneel down and speak to me in low voices; but the supreme vision, the one that was most strangely vivid, no longer manifests itself! –Alas! is it possible? In truth, Madame de Cercy-Latour did not learn this news without being very upset; she showed an air of very sincere compassion, when a little groom entered, announcing a visit. –Well! said the countess, you no longer have that great valet, who looked like a young fairground athlete? “No, I haven’t had it for two months, I think,” said Madame de Courtisols, raising her blue eyes, so ingenuous, in which shines the inimitable serenity of pure consciences. THE EVENING OF THE RETURN He fell to the floor, he was wheezing with a pink foam at the lips. Carried to the bed by a stupefied friend, who hadn’t even had time to throw away his cigar, he expired an hour later, the veins in his neck swollen. “Ruptured aneurysm,” said the doctor, who was hastily summoned . The people of the house spoke of a stroke. What was incontestable was that he was dead. He was buried, he will be seen at Père-Lachaise. As the road from Passy to this cemetery is very long, few people accompanied the deceased there; Many stopped at a restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Martin, renowned for the way they prepare sheep’s feet with chicken; they sat down at the outside tables, under the canvas awning, because the morning was beautiful; the hearse crossed the Place de la République, with jolts. The caretaker of the funeral home, in the company of the fruiterer and the wine merchant,—they were all three great walkers,—continued to follow the procession, with a dignified air, because of the top hats, which they rarely wear. They chatted about things in their neighborhood, whispering, laughing behind their handkerchiefs, giving themselves, out of reverence, the air of having a cold; they used up, in a few hours of this unexpected Sunday, a whole week of gossip collected by their wives; They also spoke of the deceased, sometimes, asserting that we are all mortal, that apoplexy is a terrible illness, which does not forgive and does not warn people. Apoplexy? Ruptured aneurysm? I think I know what this poor man died of. He was one of those wretches, finally unaccustomed to hope, who daily carry out the same insipid task, and who, if the law of the transmigration of souls reserved for them an existence analogous to their previous existence, would live again as squirrels in a cage or as horses on an omnibus. Employed in a railway administration , or in some insurance company, he did today what he had done yesterday, knew that tomorrow would be the same as today. Travelers on the great flat roads, without hills or descents, without unexpected inns, without ambushed robbers who emerge from a thicket of trees, at least know the incidents of the peasant who passes by, recommending them to God, of a pebble rolling under the sole, which could have made them fall; he did not encounter, on his path devoid of curves and crossroads, any minor circumstance, pleasant or painful; what happened to him was that nothing happened to him; even a lost position, which he soon found again with some other employer,–he was known to have certain special aptitudes which made him a valuable employee,–did not worry him or inspire in him the hope of a better situation; imagine a very narrow ditch which one can cross without lengthening one’s stride; and he had this gloomy certainty that he would never turn right or left, would never stop before the final hostelry where the rooms are in the basement and which has a cross for a sign. He was so well convinced of his irremediable mediocrity that he had long since given up envying the happiness of others; not casting his eyes, on returning from the office in the evening, into the dining rooms which let out, through the open windows, a rich noise of silverware and easy chatter, not looking at the victorias of girls, who parade through the streets perfumed promises of boudoir. Many men, finally, become accustomed to such a life, confine themselves to it, become friends with it, enjoy it. Not him. Not having been born an imbecile, and stupefaction not having come to him, he desolated himself in a lamentable boredom, deep, heavy, immeasurable, which sometimes escalated into fits of despair, where he banged his head against the walls, where he tore his hair with both fists on his bitten pillow. However, this wretch was not entirely unhappy, thanks to a memory he had. Formerly, at twenty years of age,—how many days had passed since then, what a distressing procession of hours, alas! similar to each other !—he had loved with a simple and ardent love a girl he met one evening in the Latin Quarter. She was young, more or less pretty, coming, she said, from a dressmaker’s workshop on the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie; what made him dare to speak to her was that she had dropped on the sidewalk a small work bag, made of shiny leather, which he picked up and handed to her. The next day, perhaps accustomed to hospitality that did not last long, she wanted to leave, offering a farewell kiss to her freckled forehead, where the flowers on her hat cast a faded shadow. But he did not allow her to leave, kept her all day, and other days, and others still, for a very long time. A dispatcher then with a licensed man on the left bank, he stopped going to the study; he lived, as best he could, on a few savings. In the morning, he went down to do what they called their market; he brought back in the work bag, which was a sufficient basket, two small loaves, a few brioches, half a bottle of Marsala bought at the grocer’s,—he would have been ashamed to bring up a liter in his hand,—and also two cutlets which he cooked in the fireplace of the only room; often they ate them almost raw, because there was not enough charcoal ; and, when she bit into the meat with her little teeth, or put her lips to the rim of the glass, he gazed at her, delighted, astonished that she deigned to be there, that she was willing to eat and drink while he looked at her. What she had been before knowing him, if she had been loved, if she had loved, he did not ask her , did not want to know; it was enough that she was his, now, his alone; and, no doubt, she had begun to live the evening of their meeting. No bride, the nuptial crown barely fallen from her hair, is more surrounded by respectful desires, who kneel and do not dare, is more devoutly cherished than was this poor girl whom he met one evening near the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie; so pure in body and soul, he had judged her to be like himself; he had made her a virginity of his own. Did she find much amusement in this ever more fervent tenderness, which was afraid, one might have said, of hurting her, which spoke to her with words of piety and idolatrous gratitude? She consented to stay at home, pampered, caressed, rocked; she smiled, a little surprised, letting herself be done. And this consent was enough for him to be certain of being loved, as much as he himself loved, with a love deeper, more sincere, more faithful than all the loves of this earth. Once, after a few days of anguish, he had an infinite joy. He had been obliged, for some unknown reason, to go and spend a week in the south of France, with a sick relative. He knew all the despairs of absence. Not having there, always, the one he adored, sitting at a table where she did not sit, falling asleep,–when he could fall asleep,–in a room where he had not seen her undo her hair in front of the little mirror, these were pains so great that he was surprised not to succumb to them. He was finally able to leave, using a pretext, unexpectedly. Returning,–by the express, poor as it was,–his heart was beating so fast as he went up the stairs that he had to stop twice, his hand clinging to the banister. He pushed the door, he fell to his knees. He found her again! He kissed her hand! He held her close! He could not help noticing that , when she saw him, she looked more astonished than happy; but this drop of bitterness was lost in an ocean of joy. Ah! heavens! to be with her, to touch her dress, her hair, her skin! It seemed to him that his whole heart was leaving his chest, melting, flowing down his arms, down his fingers, until it spread over her, into her: and until daybreak, with the forgetting of everything, there were mad embraces, cries, stammers that ended in gasps of tenderness. No, he would not have believed that it was given to a man to know such complete, such perfect intoxication. Alas! supreme joy was succeeded by supreme sadness. Shortly after the evening of his return, his beloved disappeared. Why had she left? Why, on an unfortunate day, had he found the house empty? Not for a moment did he suppose that she had grown weary of a love that had lasted too long, that she had left him for a more beloved lover. He believed that she had been stolen from him, that she was dead; an accident in the street, anything is possible; but, amidst the horrible bitterness of his widowhood, he had the consolation of not suspecting of treachery the one he had so loyally cherished. He kept intact the memory of those few divine months, and this memory was his refuge against all the troubles of life. Poor, condemned to gloomy tasks, yawning, growing old, whatever, he took refuge in the dear, ever-living past. He found again, in the hours of melancholy, the precious hour above all others, the hour of return when he had embraced the mistress finally seen again, when he had felt his heart leave his chest, melting, flowing along his arms, his fingers, until it spread over her, in her; and, because of this moment, when all his happiness was concentrated, he suffered the slow succession of lamentable days. Now, last month, he was returning home, pensive as usual, in the company of one of his colleagues from the office, whom he had known for a very long time; they had been clerks, together, at the licensed in the Latin Quarter. A bon vivant, this friend, wearing his forty-five years cheerfully, a regular at women’s brasseries, not engendering melancholy, as they say. He sat down, lit his cigar, chattered about how he had been deceived last week by a little scamp from the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and added that he didn’t give a damn about her, that it wasn’t anything to get worked up about, and that all women were the same. “Oh! all of them!… there are exceptions.” “Not one!” said his friend. “Beware of the scamps; they’re worse than the others. For example, do you remember Adrienne? ” “Adrienne! ” “Yes, a skinny girl, not ugly, with freckles, whom you were so obsessed with, back in the day, when we were studying law. Well ! my dear fellow—I can tell you that, after twenty-five years!—she was no better than my little scamp.” As soon as your back was turned, she would wink at me, you should have seen it, the little rascal. You understand, we’re not made of wood, I was winking at her too. It’s taken us far! It doesn’t matter, we were really angry with you for coming back from the provinces one fine evening without announcing you. Guess where I was hiding? In the wardrobe. That’s when the poor man fell to the floor, groaning, with pink foam at the mouth. ON THE BANKS OF THE LETH That day, the good Consoler, the dear Muse with the tender eyes, who always loves me and advises me like a guardian angel, looked at me for a long time, moved by my tears, and beckoned me to follow her. For many, many hours, far from the cities, far from the plains, far from the mountains and all that is mortal earth, we walked among pale mists, under a sky of clouds where the fluidity more and more aerial with vague, scattered, disappearing forms, seems to the languid traveler like the shreds of his soul, which are departing. At last we reached the trembling bank of a river,–a bank in clouds!–and the soft and gloomy wave, pale, barely visible, which flees silently under the fall of slender melancholy plants, was like a phantom of a river between manes of reeds. The Consoler said to me: –You see the divine Lethe. Since the reminiscence of lost loves pitilessly devours your heart, and you can no longer even laugh like other men or sing like other poets, because of the implacable Once upon a time, drink until you are drunk the water of the gloomy and sweet river, and be delivered from memory! Then she walked away, mist through the mists, after giving me a cup of diaphanous snow, so light and pale that it looked like the chalice of a lily, whose pulp was made of moonlight. Like Tantalus about to finally quench his devouring thirst, I leaned toward the river! But no, I did not fill the cup; and the chalice of snow, at the end of my weakened arm, which hung, did not even touch the water between the reedy waves… It was in a little house in the suburbs, where clematis climbed, that she lived, Denise! I was sixteen, not even fifteen. What astonished me was that so many people, market gardeners going to the town market or poor early morning clerks hurrying because of the surly sub-chief, peasants walking, pickaxe on their shoulders, towards the neighboring field, or carters climbing the hill shouting “hue!” and “dia!” in a crackle of whiplashes, could pass in front of this house, indifferent, without seeming to suspect that the most adorable of young girls was still asleep, there, behind the closed gray shutters. I knew well that she was there, so deliciously exquisite, Denise, and that she was sleeping in her narrow little bed, dreaming of the quarrel that her two favorite birds had had the day before in the cage, before they buried their heads under their wings. And I knew well, too, how to wake the lazy girl! Walking along the walls, hands in my pockets, as if distracted, I hummed, as I passed the closed shutter, a song she had taught me, the old song of our young loves; then very quickly, I hid in the alley, next to the house. I did not wait long. So gently, so as not to wake the father and mother, she half-opened the door, putting forward her little pink face, where a pretty laugh was laughing, where her gray eyes, under the flight of her hair, were filled with sunlight and marveled at the clear abruptness of the day. And we went along the paths that run along the gardens, behind the little houses, towards the woods wet with dew. Do you still remember, old elms, so many little flowers picked under your joyful shade that moved and parted here and there with smiles of light? We walked further into the green depths of the branches, through the tall grass, where suddenly half-wild cats, hunters of young rabbits, leaped into a scattering of bellflowers and fresh broken pearls. Hand in hand, she sometimes resting her head on my shoulder, we said tender things to each other, with sighs already and laughter still, while the birds in the awakened leaves chattered like us and loved each other like us. Like us? No. Our hearts were so ingenuous that she asked me, astonished, why that finch, over there, fluttered like this, its feathers puffed out above its finch beating the dust with its wings, and I, humiliated, did not know what to say. Ah! the sweet, the dear hours! But one morning, I hummed the old song in vain in front of the gray shutter, sadly closed, and, three days later, Denise finally left the house in the suburb, under a white sheet, in a coffin followed by her father and mother, and peasants, heads bowed, and I too, from a little further away, in tears. My heart heavy with this funereal memory, I plunged the cup into the river! but I did not withdraw it; and the soft, dull water made a little eddy lapping around the chalice the color of snow and moon…. Beautiful, no, but very blonde and very white and very plump; all refrains on her lips and all madness in her eyes; a dress of thirty-nine francs, without a corset underneath, swollen with healthy plenitudes of flesh; a devilish enthusiasm, which, lit by champagne at three francs a bottle bought at the corner grocer and by crayfish at ten centimes a piece brought in paper from the food merchant, threw hat, coat and bodice onto the bed, and, with the tip of her boot, extinguished the only candle at supper; Rose-Rosa-Rosette astonished, dazzled, enchanted my student youth! Not a penny the next day? Well! We’ll have lunch tonight; and sleeping in is not unpleasant when the mistress is not thin. I came to love her, almost. And when she had been carried off by some insignificant traveling salesman who had come from Belgium to repopulate the public harems of Brussels or Antwerp, I remained very morose in the little room on the Rue de Fleurus, where she had laughed her laugh and sung her song. I withdrew the full cup! But I did not bring it near my mouth; and I gazed fixedly at the dying water that slept in the pale lunar lily…. You were perfect, oh Lucienne! Tall, slender, and so sweetly grave in your long dress, the train of which, when you rarely stepped out of your coupé, seemed to scorn the pavement of the street, you appeared, your mouth never open, your eyes half- veiled under the reserve of lowered eyelashes, like Aristocracy herself, almost a goddess, barely a woman. All the charms that are neither consents nor promises, with all the perfumes that are not odors, emanated from you, haughty. You had, in the evening, a way of leaning on the velvet of your box, at the Opera, which disdained all men, singers or spectators, paying attention only to the vague and pure tenderness of the music; and when you were kneeling in the morning in church, there was in your attitude, at once humble and proud, something I don’t know what which made God notice that it was you who were there, and commanded him to grant you. Alas! you so high, so distant, I loved you, I, a poor man. When you went out before noon, dressed in black, under the veil, for your works of charity, I followed you, unknown, running after your carriage, happy to arrive in time to see you cross the sidewalk, in front of some humble house where you went to bring consolations and give, with your gloved hand, gold. I dreamed of being old and miserable, and lying on a pallet, and dying, for perhaps you would have entered my attic; and with what ineffable delight I would have kissed, not too close to your fingers, the dear coin of alms! In the woods, that man who, at the risk of being crushed, threw himself through the carriages to get closer to yours; under the carriage doors of the hotels, that man who mingled with the braided crowd of servants to watch you descend the carpeted steps , in the lights, between the rare plants, that was me! And I did not complain about being forever separated from you. I knew that you were, at the same time as the greatest and the most beautiful, the purest; that, even admitted into your world, into your intimacy, I could not have conceived any hope; that the severity of your smile extinguished the desires in all hearts, stopped the confessions on all lips. I accepted the melancholy of being for you someone who does not exist. You were the divinity, I was the devotee. Does God know all his faithful? The happiness of adoring you consoled me for the sadness of not telling you. And this happiness lasted for three years, until the day I learned that your husband was suing you for legal separation because, one evening, as he was returning from hunting, he had surprised you in the arms of his groom, in the attic above the stable. Resolved this time, I put my lips to the cup! But I did not drink a drop of the dull and sweet water that fell, like tears in the river, between the reeds… Then she who had guided me to Lethe returned and cried: “What! You do not want to be forgotten, you who suffer? ” “Cruel consoler,” I replied, “there is no fatal or abject love whose memory is as dreadful as the despair of not having loved!” And if you know a river whose blessed and cursed water revives and exasperates memory, lead me to its banks so that I may become intoxicated with anguish and delight! In conclusion, ‘Short Skirt’ by Catulle Mendès leaves us with a profound reflection on human relationships, desires, and the compromises we make in the name of love. This story reminds us that every choice has consequences, sometimes unexpected. A tale where we lose and find ourselves through the emotions that define our existence.

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• L’histoire suit le parcours complexe de ses personnages, pris dans les tourments de leurs émotions et de leurs décisions.
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–📜 Micah Clarke – Tome I | Arthur Conan Doyle ✨ [https://youtu.be/255ZBJMXVrU]
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